YouTube EDU launched today, an educational hub “volunteer project sparked by a group of employees who wanted to find a better way to collect and highlight all the great educational content being uploaded to YouTube by colleges and universities” according to a short blurb
on the YouTube blog. The official announcement is apparently tomorrow.
The site is aggregating videos from dozens of colleges and universities, ranging from lectures to student films to athletic events. Some of this stuff is solid gold (the Stanford and MIT lectures are really good). Other content, not so interesting.
It is interesting that this move comes on the heels of the launching of academic earth a startup trying to do the same thing. I think education can benefit greatly from online video technology and this development will be a tremendous boost to this cause.