I have been thinking about “online education” for a while, its future, especially knowing how much of a topic it has been for a while, to Bill gates publicly stating that the future of education is moving online. He has also shown how much he cares about strengthening online education by publicly pouring his heart about Khan Academy and Academic earth.

It only makes you think about the future of education, not only because of Bill Gates statements, but to pause for a moment on the new direction in which education is currently heading towards at the moment.

Should online education be pursued rather the more the more constructural education process, which is cutting a big hole in our pockets as we know, especially with the increase of Tuition fees for all UK Universities and also the large amount of money it costs to go to college in the states.

I’m sure not that everyone wants to start learning online yet if ever, There are some people that feel it all makes sense, I am sure most people are just fine going to university and learning, but you can’t argue that online education costs so much less.

I got into a conversation with a friend of mine a while ago on facebook, and most of his argument was that going to university/college did not just teach students academically but instead provided them with real-life experiences and if online education was to be introduced as the more reliant way of education, most people would be lost in the world.

That university gives most people, the opportunity to find themselves, make friends and build contacts for the working world. He argued that university/college is more than education, the overall experience is = Growing from a child to Man/Woman.

My argument was that i know a lot of people that have great jobs from practical experiences, had enough times to find themselves and gone to enough networking events to build that important contact list. If you look at it both ways, it works, it all depends on the individual on what they feel comfortable doing.

I just think we are different people that choose different things, different paths and different ways of life. i do not believe that online education should become the focal point of education or the other kind of education which i will call ‘offline education’, i think both of them existing will only just give different people different options in life that’s all.

I also decided to also put a list 10 of those websites that are leading new revolution of online education.

Let me know your thoughts about the topic in the comment section.

Academic earth

Richard Ludlow launched Academic Earth on March 24, 2009, it offers free online video lectures from universities such as as UC Berkeley, UCLA, Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Stanford, and Yale.

Khan academy

The Khan Academy is a not-for-profit educational organization created by Salman Khan. With the stated mission of “providing a high quality education to anyone, anywhere”, the Academy supplies a free online collection of over 2,000 videos on mathematics, history, finance, physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy, and economics

YouTube EDU

It contains videos from dozens of colleges and universities, ranging from lectures to student films to athletic events.

TED

TED is a nonprofit devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading. It began in 1984 as an annual conference devoted to Technology, Entertainment and Design — hence TED — but TED’s reach, and its scope, have become ever broader since then. TEDTalks cover science, arts, politics, global issues, architecture, music and more.

Video Lectures

The website offers free online courses with more than 18000 videos, 740 Online University Courses.

Fora.tv

It gathers the web’s largest collection of unmediated video drawn from live events, lectures, and debates at universities, think tanks and conferences.

Video Lectures

VideoLectures.NET is a free and open access educational video lectures repository.

Learners Tv

This site provides free video/audio lectures of whole courses conducted by faculty from reputed universities around the world.

http://www1.teachertube.com/

TeacherTube.com provides an online community for sharing instructional teacher videos, it allows teachers to share educational resources such as video, audio, documents, photos, groups and blogs. As of October 2010, TeacherTube has over 725,000+ educational members and over 200,000 educational videos.

School Tube

SchoolTube.com is a website dedicated to student video and media sharing for entertainment and classroom use.

Richard Ludlow is the founder and CEO of Academic Earth, a platform for full video courses from leading universities.

Richard graduated in 2007 with a BA and MA in Economics from Yale University and deferred admission to Harvard Business School in order to start Academic Earth.

Please, kindly give the YHP Readers some background information about yourself and what you do?

I suppose I could be labelled as a “serial social entrepreneur.” While in college at Yale University, I started a national student organization to promote organ donor registration, and a non-profit economics magazine aimed at making new developments in the field of economics more accessible to a general audience. A few months after graduating in 2007, I began preparing to start Academic Earth.

Can you explain to us what your company does?

Academic Earth offers free access to full video courses from leading universities such as Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and MIT. We use the power of the internet to give people all over the world access to high-quality learning opportunities that previously were only available to a very small number of students.

What inspired you to start your company?

As a student, I used materials from MIT to supplement my own education, but I believed that consumers would benefit from an easy-to-use centralized repository that brought together free educational resources from many institutions.

How did you finance your business?

I raised a medium-sized round of angel/seed funding from a group of individuals including several Yale professors.

What plans do you have now to expand your business further?

I can’t yet talk about some of the growth opportunities I consider to be most exciting, but in the short-term we plan to add additional videos and course materials and make improvements to provide a great online learning experience.

What systems have you used to automate your business to give you more time for business planning and development?

We have utilized outsourced work through sites such as eLance when we need assistance on large-scale repetitive projects.

How do you market your products or services?

We don’t spend much on marketing. Rather, bloggers and reporters have found the site and written about it, and most of our growth comes from word-of-mouth and social media sharing.

Do you believe business has any obligation to make the world a better place?

Academic Earth was founded with a social mission to extend educational opportunities to the world, but I don’t impose any altruistic obligations on businesses in general. So long as they are behaving responsibly (for example with regards to the environment and their workers), I think many businesses add value to society simply by meeting consumers’ desires, even if they don’t have what would generally be considered altruistic objectives.

How does your business “give back” to the community or to society?

Academic Earth provides free high-quality learning opportunities to people around the globe.

Do you believe there is some sort of pattern or formula to becoming a successful entrepreneur?

I have seen entrepreneurs follow many paths to success, but one thing I have noticed is that the romanticized notion of the entrepreneur as a risk-loving maverick doesn’t necessarily hold up. Most successful entrepreneurs I have observed are very intelligent people who pursue opportunities methodically and find ways to systematically reduce risk.

What have been some of your failures, and what have you learned from them?

I don’t have one or two big failures that make for a great story, but behind nearly every success I’ve ever had are a series of small failures along the way. I believe the key is to focus on getting better every day. Over a period of several years, the sum of all the small improvements you make to small failures adds up to very valuable progression.

If you had the chance to start your career over again, what would you do differently?

I’m not far into my career, but if I were to go back to when I first started Academic Earth, I would have invested more time learning about web programming so I could have been more hands on with the development of the site. I am just now beginning to do so.

What qualities have you developed as a result of running your business?

As an early stage entrepreneur I’ve had to wear many hats. I’ve raised money, determined our legal structure, hired, marketed, designed web pages, and more. The main quality I’ve developed is a confidence in my ability to learn the knowledge or skills needed to tackle a new challenge.

In your opinion, what is the most important quality an entrepreneur should possess?

Assertiveness.

In one word, characterize your life as an entrepreneur?

Unpredictable.

What are your hobbies? What do you do in your non-work time?

I’m a huge basketball fan and follow the NBA obsessively, in addition to playing the sport recreationally.

Excluding yours, what company or business do you admire the most and why?

I’m very impressed with Mint.com, which was recently acquired by Intuit. Their product provides a very clear value proposition to consumers, and their execution has always been superb.

Thanks for your time Richard, we wish you the best in the future.

Richard Ludlow: Academic Earth
Richard Ludlow on LinkedIN