While the current economic crisis still bogging us down to our knees, I chanced upon an insightful lecture by Dr. Alan Blinder, a Professor of Economics and Public Affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University. A world renowned economist, Prof. Blinder speaks very eloquently about the multiple causes and culprits of the current economic crisis and also spells out the possible remedies. It was an extremely educational experience for me, and I think will be the same for many people like me who keep on hearing multiple different stories from different sources.

Academic Earth: The Online Ivy League College

Lectures like this and many others are made available though a wonderful website of Academic Earth who made it their mission to make world class education available to everybody. Many top universities these days are making some of their course materials available online for free. You can visit the websites of universities like MIT, Princeton, Harvard, Stanford, Yale and others and go through hours of lectures on varied topics. Academic Earth makes them available through a single source. Although still in beta, this site has an impressive collection of courses on almost all major topics like Economics, Physics, Chemistry, Philosophy and many others. Besides full courses, it also includes lectures like the one above by Prof. Blinder. One I enjoyed was by Tom Friedman talking about his book “The World is Flat 3.0” to an MIT audience.
The philosophy course on “Death” by Yale Prof. Shelly Kagan is another course that I plan to attend some time soon.
If you always wanted to learn more about the wonders of the world and beyond from these wonderful instructors from the best universities of the world, your wait seems to be over.