Academic Earth is a non-profit organization founded in 2009 by Richard Ludlow with the goal of providing free, online access to educational content from top universities worldwide in order to make high-quality education available to everyone. The organization builds an educational ecosystem that centralizes online courses and lectures to make learning easier through finding, interacting with, and learning from video content on their user-friendly website. Academic Earth partners with universities to share their open educational resources and make full video lectures accessible online.

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What is it? AE mission statement
Academic Earth is an organization founded with the goal of giving everyone on earth access to a
world-class education.
As more and more high quality educational content becomes available online for free, we ask our-
selves, what are the real barriers to achieving a world class education? At Academic Earth, we are
working to identify these barriers and find innovative ways to use technology to increase the ease of
learning.
We are building a user-friendly educational ecosystem that will give internet users around the world the
ability to easily find, interact with, and learn from full video courses and lectures from the world’s lead-
ing scholars. Our goal is to bring the best content together in one place and create an environment in
which that content is remarkably easy to use and where user contributions make existing content in-
creasingly valuable.
We invite those who share our passion to explore our website, participate in our online community,
and help us continue to find new ways to make learning easier for everyone.
Academic Earth is headquartered in San Francisco, CA.

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Who started it?
Richard Ludlow
Richard came up with the idea for Academic Earth while studying international development at Yale Uni-
versity. Throughout college, Richard had been particularly inspired by social entrepreneurs such as Wendy
Kopp, Jimmy Wales, and Charles Best whose innovative efforts have improved educational opportunities
for people on a very large scale.
Having used “OpenCourseWare” materials to supplement his own education, Richard knew not only how
valuable this type of content is, but how much could be done to make it more accessible for people around
the globe. He founded Academic Earth with the idea that centralizing online education resources, applying
the latest tools in web development, and building a platform for rich community contributions could lead
to a perpetually improving educational ecosystem that provided anyone with an internet connection access
to teachings directly from some of the world’s greatest scholars.
Prior to Academic Earth, Richard established Students for Organ Donation, a student-run volunteer or-
ganization that promotes organ donor awareness and registration on high school and college campuses.
Additionally, he founded the Yale Economic Review, a journal of popular economics sold at newsstands
throughout the United States. Richard holds a BA in Economics and MA in International and Develop-
ment Economics, both from Yale University.

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When was it started and who is involved?
Academic Earth is a website launched March 24, 2009 which
offers free online video lectures from universities such as
UC Berkeley, UCLA, Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Stanford,
and Yale in the subjects of Astronomy, Biology, Chemistry,
Computer Science, Economics, Engineering, English, Entre-
preneurship, History, Law, Mathematics, Medicine, Philoso-
phy, Physics, Political Science, Psychology, and Religion.

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Media recognition
TIME 50 Best WebsitesbusinessweekPCMag
TIME.com - 50 Best Websites of 2009
PC Mag - Top 100 Websites
BusinessWeek - America’s Most Promising Social Entrepreneurs & Top 25 Entrepreneurs Under 25
Selected Press
March 2009 Telegraph.co.uk
“These are not cut-up dumbed-down introductions made zippy for today’s short attention spans, they are the full-length lec-
tures that you would see if you were an undergraduate at Yale, Berkeley, Harvard, MIT, Princeton or Stanford.”
February 2009 Slate Magazine
“It’s been years since I was in school, and I’ve got few fond memories of going to class. But Academic Earth is unexpectedly
irresistible. It’s like Hulu, but for nerds.”
January 2009 American Public Media
“On the new site Academic Earth you can watch lectures on physics from M.I.T., or catch a Yale history course on the ori-
gins of World War I, or see a U.C. Berkeley professor cradle a brain while she talks about human anatomy.”

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How does it work?
1. Choose a University,
subject, or instructor.
2. Watch the video as if you
are in the classroom.
3. Finish assignments and
learn at your own pace.

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Want to partner?
Partnering with Academic Earth
We’re working to bring together the best available educational content for
our users. We are most interested in video content that is packaged with
additional educational materials (activities, exercises, readings, and assign-
ments).
If you are a professor, educator, or representative from an academic insti-
tution and would like to use our platform to distribute content to learners
worldwide, we would be excited to hear from you.
Please contact Chris Bruner at partners@academicearth.org for additional
information on our content partnership opportunities.