These might deserve to be noted as being more along the lines of higher education, but are still worth noting. Academic Earth and a subsite of Youtube, www.youtube.com/edu are now featuring tons of academic lectures and entire courses. (Wonder if my school is blocking them yet?)

Both of these sites are featuring lectures from the likes of Yale, Harvard, and MIT. But each have their own layouts, organizations, and niches. YouTube for example, features the well known “YouTube” interface that most of us are familiar with by breaking it down into “Most Subscribed” “Most Viewed” “Channels” and a Directory which is a staggering list of  the schools. Breaking it down by school is probably more useful if you are a student at a particular university, the rest of us will probably be hitting up the search. Regardless, it appears that YouTube is more of a casual lecture by lecture viewing.

Academic Earth, while not appearing to have as many schools on board, really shines when it comes to checking out lecture series and courses. Hit up the playlist and you will see what I mean. It also seems to do a better job at helping you find what you want by allowing you to narrow it down to topic, speaker, and university. Academic Earth also makes everything open meaning it is all able to be downloaded and embedded.

Living in the times we are in, a lot of content tends to be condensed, and broken into bite size pieces for the casual viewer. Since both of these sites are focusing more on the raw lecture and entire courses, it really lends itself more to the TED crowd, or those looking to down entire subjects. Regardless, they should be checked out.