Yale offers free online courses

Students and "self-learners" across the globe can now access many of Yale's educational offerings through a program launched Tuesday called "Open Yale," which will offer courses online and free to the public.

The initiative — which is being piloted this year — offers access to video and audio-only lectures, searchable transcripts, problem sets and other materials for seven of the university's most popular courses, program director and Yale art history and classics professor Diana Kleiner said.

The resources made available by Yale are extremely accessible, Kleiner said, and are available in multiple bandwidths to accommodate a variety of computers. Everything is downloadable so that "a faculty member in a remote corner of the developing world ... putting together a course for the first time" can incorporate a useful piece of Yale's course materials. "We're very excited about that," she said.

Yale is one of a number of schools, including Harvard and MIT, that have already made courses available online. Harvard's courses are offered for a fee through the Harvard Extension School, while MIT is a member of the international Open Courseware Consortium, which offers different schools' courses free of charge.

"I expect more universities will probably participate in this kind of thing, and I expect that each will ... bring to it something new and something different," Kleiner said of the trend to offer courses to a wider audience through the internet and distance learning. "I think that academic institutions like Yale should absolutely share their resources and actively participate in the kind of democratization of knowledge."

But the University is not ready to jump on the Yale-Harvard bandwagon just yet. "Princeton, as a matter of policy, is not interested in engaging in distance-learning," Associate Dean of the College Peter Quimby said.

Quimby added that he is concerned about how putting video cameras in the classroom would affect students' learning experience. "We have some questions about whether students would engage in asking questions, in responding to questions, in interacting with a faculty member, if they knew that [those interactions] would be made available to the broader public without any kind of filter," he said.

The University does post a significant number of public lectures online, including those on the University Channel. Launched in 2005 by the Wilson School, the channel provides downloadable video and audio feeds of lectures and panels from universities around the world, many of which are now available on iTunes.

Despite his reluctance to see the University offer online courses, Quimby praised Yale's decision to make its academics available to a wider audience. "It is a really lovely outreach program that they have engaged in at some significant expense in terms of effort," he said. But, he added, "it's a very intensive undertaking, a pretty significant investment for the University, and it wouldn't benefit our students."

The Open Yale program is aided by a grant from the Hewlett Foundation, but Quimby said that even if Princeton received such a grant, putting together a program of online courses for the public is not on the University's agenda at the moment. "We haven't decided not to [offer courses online]," he said. "We just haven't really sat down and looked at it comprehensively yet."

Betty Leydon, the University's vice president for information technology, noted that online courses can never quite replicate a live classroom environment. "Although a student can read materials and, in some cases, watch lectures, there is no student-faculty interaction and no assessment," she said of the programs offered by Yale, MIT and Harvard. "Princeton believes strongly that student-faculty interaction and engagement is a critical part of learning. So, while it's nice to have materials online, it's not the same thing as taking a course at Princeton."

Kleiner acknowledged that the Open Yale program will never quite mimic a Yale classroom. "It needs to be kept in mind that education on campus is different," she said. Rather, she added, the program "reflects and enhances the value of a Yale education [and] highlights the merit of a liberal arts education in today's increasingly specialized world."

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The courses offered through Open Yale include astronomy, modern poetry, philosophy, political philosophy, psychology and the Old Testament. Eight new courses are being produced this year, and Yale plans to add 30 more courses over the next three years.