Yale Bulletin and Calendar

September 22, 2006|Volume 35, Number 3

Project will make select Yale College
courses available to all on Internet

With a grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, Yale is producing digital videos of selected undergraduate courses this fall and next spring, which it will make available free of charge on the Internet, together with full transcripts in several languages, syllabi and other course materials.

The Open Educational Resources Video Lecture Project has received $755,000 for an 18-month pilot phase. It will create multidimensional packages for seven courses and design a Web interface for these materials, to be launched in the fall of 2007. If the venture proves successful, Yale hopes to significantly expand its online offerings over the next few years.

"This is a wonderful opportunity for us to share a vital and central part of the Yale experience with those who, for whatever reason, are not in a position to pursue a Yale education at first hand," says President Richard C. Levin.

"This exciting new venture is part of thinking more globally about the University and its reach beyond the walls of Yale," notes Diana E.E. Kleiner, who is directing the project. Kleiner is the Dunham Professor of the History of Art and Classics and formerly deputy provost with responsibility for arts, divinity and new media.

Kleiner is intimately familiar with the world of online education, having served as Yale's academic liaison for the Alliance for Lifelong Learning -- AllLearn -- a collaborative online distance-learning venture with Stanford University and the University of Oxford. Over a five-year period starting in 2001, Yale developed two dozen arts and sciences courses for AllLearn, as well as writing courses and other offerings.

Yale's new project differs from AllLearn in its emphasis on open access and on self-directed education: Users will listen to the lectures and complete readings at their discretion, and they will not interact with instructors. The new venture joins a growing number of university-based initiatives that use the Internet to make educational materials widely available. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology's OpenCourseWare project, also supported by the Hewlett Foundation, has placed syllabi, lecture notes and other materials for hundreds of courses on the institute's website.

"The Hewlett Foundation is committed to making high-quality educational content and tools freely available on the web by partnering with leading universities, says Marshall Smith, director of the Hewlett Foundation's Education Program. "Yale's commitment to open educational resources is a very important contribution to this goal." Detailed information on the Yale project and others supported by Hewlett's Open Educational Resources Initiative is on the foundation's website: www.hewlett.org/Programs/Education/OER/openEdResources.htm.

The OpenCourseWare model has been widely emulated, but Yale will be the first university to tap the potential of digital video by combining course architecture with essentially complete sets of lectures from these courses, as presented by its faculty. In this way, Kleiner points out, the new project will also be a catalyst for innovation in the educational experience at Yale.

"It has the power to transform teaching and learning on campus in ways we can't yet fully fathom and are eager to explore," she says.

To create the online offerings that will introduce and test this new approach, Yale will draw on its recognized excellence in teaching across the full spectrum of liberal arts disciplines. Some of Yale's most distinguished scholars are taking part. The three courses being taped this fall are:

* "Introduction to the Old Testament," with Christine Hayes, the Robert F. and Patricia Ross Weis Professor of Religious Studies;

* "Fundamentals of Physics," with Ramamurti Shankar, the John Randolph Huffman Professor and chair of physics; and

* "Introduction to Political Philosophy," with Steven Smith, the Alfred Cowles Professor of Political Science.

Those whose courses are slated for taping next spring include Charles Bailyn, the Thomas E. Donnelley Professor of Astronomy; Paul Bloom, professor of psychology; and Langdon Hammer, professor and chair of English.

Handling the technical aspects of the project will be Yale's Center for Media Initiatives, which teamed with Kleiner in AllLearn and has played a key role in the University's rapid expansion of the course materials available online to Yale students.

T H I SW E E K ' SS T O R I E S

Project will make select Yale College courses available to all on Internet

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JE exhibit features photographer's portraits of gay and lesbian authors

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Circumcision advocacy programs reduce incidence of HIV, report shows

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Conference examines the work of German political theorist . . .

Two assistant professors win awards for environmental health research

Five alumni are honored with the Yale Medal . . .

Forum explored the topic of 'Biodiversity and Human Health'

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