Last week 10 new courses were added to "Open Yale Courses." All lectures were recorded in the Yale College classroom as were presented to Yale College students and are available in video, audio, and text transcript format.
The new courses are: Freshman Organic Chemistry I; European Civilization, 1648-1945; Dante in Translation; Listening to Music; The Psychology, Biology, and Politics of Food; Principles of Evolution, Ecology, and Behavior; Introduction to Theory of Literature; Roman Architecture; Global Problems of Population Growth and Introduction to New Testament History and Literature.
Together with previously posted courses there are 26 free online courses available to anyone with access to the Internet. All lectures were recorded in the Yale College classroom as were presented to Yale College students and are available in video, audio, and text transcript format. Registration is not required, no course credit is available and no interaction with the professors is available.
The aim of this initiative is to provide open access to educational material for everyone willing to learn. As the
"Open Yale Courses" website states:
Yale's philosophy of teaching and learning begins with the aim of training a broadly based, highly disciplined intellect without specifying in advance how that intellect will be used. This approach goes beyond the acquisition of facts and concepts to cultivate skills and habits of rigorous, independent thought: the ability to analyze, to ask the next question, and to begin the search for an answer. We hope the lectures and other course materials on this site will be a resource for critical thinking, creative imagination, and intellectual exploration.
Most of the material on "Open Yale Courses" is published under Creative Commons license (
Creative Commons-Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike), which means that everyone can copy, distribute, transmit and adapt the work. Although it's not allowed to use this work for commercial purposes and remixed work must be distributed only under the same (or similar) license.
Posting these lectures under such conditions make them available not only for individuals wishing to learn, but also for other lecturers and academics, who can create their own educational materials based on Yale's courses. They are already in use in educational institutions in Bahrain, Ghana, Turkey, Guatemala, Mexico and China.
President of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, a major funder of Open Yale Courses - Paul Brest, quoted by
Media Newswire, said:
A far-flung location or the lack of money should be no barrier to acquiring knowledge and education, if a person wants to learn. Yale’s broadening offerings affirm what we believe: that knowledge is a common good that should be freely shared.
Free Yale courses are available at
Open Yale Courses website,
You Tube and
iTunes.
