We are thrilled to learn that our friends at Videolectures.net have just been named World Summit Award winners for best “e- Science & Technology” product of the decade. The World Summit Awards are sponsored by the UN and UNESCO.
While our video redistribution through iTunes U and YouTube probably receives more attention, Videolectures.net may well be the best experience for those looking for a site deigned to share educational content from the ground up, and they are a key redistributor of our content in Europe.
As of now, Videolectures.net contains 1755 MIT OpenCourseWare videos, which have been viewed 1,039,691 times. Congratulations to the team at Videolectures.net!
Here’s an excerpt from the press release:

The World Summit Award
The World Summit Award (WSA) was launched in 2003 and is a part of the United Nations Summit on the Information Society. It represents a unique global competition for the recognition of best e-Content and global creativity. Its Online Jury evaluated 200 WSA winners from the last decade and selected what they consider to be the 8 all-time bests: the WSIS+10 Global Champions. VideoLectures.Net was selected as the winner in the “e- Science & Technology” category. The winners will presented at the WSA grand gala in Paris on 26th February 2013.
VideoLectures.Net
With this prestigious award, Videolectures.Net has proven that its vision of free and open access to academic knowledge in the form of online videos is the right approach for addressing the global digital divide in education and knowledge transfer.

The website functions as an online video library, and was established with the aim of promoting access to academic lectures given by distinguished scholars, scientists, researchers and academics from many scientific fields, at conferences, summer schools, workshops and, even, the university classroom. It also serves as a publication channel for academic videos relating to research projects within the Sixth Framework Programme (FP6), Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) and the upcoming Horizon 2020.

At present, the video library includes content from 761 events, 10,763 authors and 14,251 lectures (some 16,442 videos in total). It is a unique resource for high-quality and specialised academic talks. VideoLectures.Net is shaping the future of education and as the collection has got larger, the activities of VideoLectures.Net have become more complex. So in 2010 it co-founded the Knowledge 4 All Foundation Ltd, in order to maximise the impact of the online collection and dedicate resources to the creation of tools and intelligent services that complement and enhance its video content.