Online marketing and education don’t go well together you say? Apparently Ampush Media doesn’t think so as the online marketing company have just acquired Academic Earth, an online portal similar to iTunesU, YouTube EDU, ForaTV or Udemy Academic.
Ampush Media specializes in the student recruiting space and works together with universities to develop social strategies in order to attract matching students. Academic Earth and Ampush Media have already been closely working together for over a year according to the founder of Academic Earth Richard Ludlow.
I first wrote about Academic Earth in February 2009. Back then the platform already offered thousands of videos by top scholars. Though the videos have been freely available on the Internet for quite a while, it was hard to learn with them as often the lectures were not complete or detached from another. Academic Earth and later Udemy Academic were amongst the first to sort and curate those courses. New players in this space like MentorMob try to take this approach and bring it into the informal and life long learning space.
Today, Academic Earth offers 350 complete courses and over 5000 lectures from MIT, Yale, Princeton etc on a variety of subjects. According to TechCrunch the site has now 400k unique visitors per month or 10% of Khan Academy.
Below you can read the personal note of Academic Earth founder Richard Ludlow.
Dear Friends,
Three years ago, I founded Academic Earth with the goal of connecting people around the globe with high quality learning opportunities from world-class educators.
Today, I am delighted to announce that Academic Earth has been acquired by Ampush Media, an accomplished and rapidly growing online media and technology company with extensive experience in higher education. Ampush Media has worked closely with us for more than a year and has proven to be the ideal partner to help further the pursuit of Academic Earth’s founding mission.
This partnership provides the expertise and resources to improve our learning platform, including significant investments of new content and feature development. I will continue to serve on Academic Earth’s advisory board as we collectively endeavor to take the site to the next level.
I am grateful for your support, and, as always, welcome your suggestions on how we can continue to make Academic Earth an outstanding educational resource.
Sincerely,
Richard Ludlow
Via: TechCrunch
