The goal of HippoCampus is to provide high-quality, multimedia content on general education subjects to high school and college students free of charge.

HippoCampus was designed as part of Open Education Resources (OER), a worldwide effort to improve access to quality education for everyone. HippoCampus content has been developed by some of the finest colleges and universities in the world and contributed to the National Repository of Online Courses (NROC), another MITE project. NROC makes editorial and engineering investment in the content to prepare it for distribution by HippoCampus. Both HippoCampus and NROC are supported by The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

HippoCampus is a project of the Monterey Institute for Technology and Education (MITE).