There have been recently a few posts about new tools for learning online, with videos or just with some books. As it seems, the learning goes Open-Source and I have to say that I really appreciate this.
The most recent example of E-Learning is Academic Earth. An initiative coming from the United States as many innovative things come from there. The site is reachable under Academicearth.org. The student or interested person will find there whole lectures and courses on video in good quality, as the example down below shows. There must have been also some effort to cut all these videos, in a way, that the slideshows of the lecturer are shown in the right moment.
What I think is really remarkable about Academic Earth, is the fact that the founders Richard Ludlow (graduated at Yale) and Chris Bruner (graduated at Stanford) have built in from the beginning the networking tools a modern student uses today. You can embed the videos easily (as you see above), can share them on different platforms such as Facebook, Del.icio.us... There are many things more, like downloading a movie, mail a link, rate it and so on. This is really something great.
The next I found on a quick search on Techcrunch.com was YoutubeEDU. You will find the site under Youtube.com/edu.
Well I think I do not need to explain how nice Youtube is. There are many nice and well established features and a lot of videos. But there are a lot of advertising videos and materials on this platform, as I had to notice when I made the first few clicks. Ads are nothing bad generally, but have not so much to do with education, except that students can inform themselves where they want to go to study. But this information does not necessarily have to be published on an e-learning platform, maybe linked but not more.
As a third I want you to present another new service for the german speaking countries in Europe (essentially Switzerland, Germany and Austria): PaperC is a new service called, on which you can read (selected) textbooks for free online.
They are still in the Beta-Phase (closed testgroup) and testing right now new features such as taking notes on pages, download pages and print them out (0.05 Euro per Page), or you can now tag some pages.
All together are these three tools a nice step into the direction of "Open Source Learning". I personally like the Academic Earth most, since the videos are in a good quality and the topics are interesting with a clear focus on learning. I just hope that there will be more of this stuff soon.
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