Last week YouTube launched a new education channel at http://www.youtube.com/edu with a fair amount of publicity. The channel, which is a product of Googles famous 20% time, features video content from a large number American colleges but as yet does not represent content from Europe (in fact as Laura pointed out the Open University YouTube channel has many more viewers than most of these US colleges).
The channel is actually pretty well done, with a clean, ad-free design that feels very different to the normal YouTube experience and it also offers the chance to ‘Apply to YouTube EDU’ which is sure to add even more content from Universities and Colleges.
It was particularly fun to see that the most viewed video on the first couple of days was ‘the Science of the Watchmen‘ from the University of Minnesota – thats the sort of fact that warms the heart of a comic book geek like myself!
This does rather ask the question about how the likes of Academic Earth are going to compete? Its hard for any video sites to compete with YouTube, especially with the added benefit of results in Google searches. It also looks like the hard fought relationships that Google have built with many Higher Education Institutions over the last couple of years have come into play here judging by the levels of ‘official’ endorsements coming out of the community.
As an Englishman it is my instinct to support the underdog so I’ll be rooting for Academic Earth and the other smaller start-ups but life certainly just got alot tougher.
Hot on the heels of the announcement of the University of the People another startup with similar goals has been getting its share of publicity.
Academic Earth (these guys certainly like the grand names!) is a startup coming out of the US that pulls together open courseware from a number of top universities and displays them according to topic with the option to comment and converse around the videos.
So far so good, however Academic Earth is a business and as such has commercial aims for its site which is pretty firmly against the Creative Commons terms that some (not all) of these videos have been released under and some of the institutions involved are unlikely to sit back and allow their content to be reused in this manner.
This is likely to be an interesting test case as I think alot of people are eyeing the increasingly high quality education audio and video content coming out of universities like MIT, Stanford, the Open University etc and wondering how they can spin a money making opportunity out of this increased open attitude.
It would be a pity if these academics started to retreat into their ivory towers if they felt their content was being misused but it also opens up the possibility of a consortium of universities with strong open access models pooling their resources and building their own web based repository of content with community elements. That would likely shake this space up quite considerably.
To be fair to the team at Academic Earth they seem fully aware of the tightrope they are walking and are trying to work with the institutions so as not to step on anyones toes while still retaining a business model. I think it will be quite the achievement if they pull this off!
On Friday we had an internal workshop here at Jiva HQ around the subjects of collaborative filtering and customer choice. The session was led by Gavin Potter, who has a small measure of fame thanks to an article in Wired magazine about his involvement in the Netflix prize as ‘Just a Guy in a Garage’.
Gavin has a quote he uses to underpin his work which i think is pretty central to an awful lot of the thinking we do at Jiva (even if its not immediately obvious from our output up til now)
“If the 20th century was about sorting out supply, the 21st is going to be about sorting out demand”
It was a very different day than I was expecting as it involved very little melting of my brain as the hard mathematics that inevitably underpin this kind of work was left to one side and instead we focused on much more practical questions of how we could improve our websites, particularly how we could use the data we captured to improve recommendations and search results.
We identified all manner of things we could do to improve our current (and upcoming) products from simple copy improvements to quite advanced filtering systems and I am now working on pulling them together in a meaningful way to see how they can be integrated into our existing development roadmap.
All in all it was a very useful session but once again demonstrated we are very good at generating more ideas than we’ll ever have the resources to actually implement :)
In a pretty amazing PR coup an Israeli entrepreneur, Shai Resef, managed to get worldwide publicity including notably in the New York Times, for his new education based start-up the University of the People. The article makes some grand claims and glosses over the fact that the plans are mainly speculative at the moment as nothing has really launched and there remain many hurdles to overcome (not least the issue of assessment and accreditation).
The growth of the open learning is undoubted (with the UKs own Open University a leading player with initiatives like OpenLearn and its iTunesU content) but despite the claims in the article I believe peer-to-peer learning remains unproven in many ways (though I do believe it is a useful concept and one that will only become more popular over time) and the reliance of a mish-mash of retired professors, MA level students and volunteers as a kind of virtual faculty does not sound hugely thought out as yet (though there is probably a workable solution in there somewhere) .
Mr Resef does have a history of running successful education themed web businesses, including his current start-up Cramster.com an online homework support network, so he well placed to have the skills and contacts to make this happen.
I’ll be watching this one closely as its an idea I’m really interested in and I think there is a business to be built around the rise in open education that also widens access to higher education, I’m just not quite sure this is it yet.