Based in San Francisco, Academic Earth is an open access repository of full video courses and lectures held by leading scholars from the most prestigious American universities, such as MIT, Stanford, Berkeley, Harvard, Princeton, and Yale. The entire database includes over 15,000 videos in various fields including the political and social sciences. Every course contains from 4 to 50 lectures, and the topics range from political philosophy to game theory and international studies. The site content is classified by subject, university, instructor and playlist selected by the website editors, while ‘most viewed’, ‘top rated’ and ‘top rated instructors’ reflect user preferences. An advanced search – by video type, rating, university and subject – is also available. Around half of the videos are embedded in the website and are freely accessible for viewing and downloading. The others can be seen using the download below each video to get to the quicktime version or on a Blip partner platform. Users can also personalize their AcademicEarth page, sharing videos on social networks and websites, citing, giving feedback, voting, subscribing to podcasts and organizing their favourite content after logging in. Individual audio and video files together with the complete transcript can also be downloaded. Reading assignments, bibliographical and online resources, slides and a short summary are available for each lecture. The platform is freely accessible and user-friendly. The courses and lectures are standardized in size and length.
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