Yale adds 10 new Open Yale Courses

Ten new Yale College courses — ranging from financial theory to Cervantes’ Don Quixote to environmental politics and law — have been added to Open Yale Courses, the University’s open educational initiative. The content for each of these 10 courses is available for free to anyone with access to the Internet.

Each course, recorded in its entirety as it was presented to Yale College students, is taught by one of the University’s most distinguished faculty members. Open Yale Courses may be accessed at http://oyc.yale.edu.

The courses are available in high-definition video and audio formats, and they offer the full experience of the Yale classroom. Closed captioning is provided for each course, as well as searchable transcripts, syllabi, reading assignments, problem sets and other materials.

Interested individuals may download the video and/or audio files of Open Yale Courses and watch and listen to them at their convenience. There are also iPhone- and iPad-optimized versions of the website to allow access to the lectures for those on the go. No registration is required for these courses, and participants do not earn academic credit from Yale nor do they interact with the professors.

Open Yale Courses is one of the most frequently visited Yale websites. It has received over 3 million unique visits since its debut in December 2007 and has delivered 26 million page views since April 1, 2009 (when Google Analytics was put on the site). In an effort to increase accessibility and to allow faster downloading of the materials, Open Yale Courses media content is also available at Yale’s YouTube and Apple iTunesU channels. Open Yale Courses content can be viewed through these platforms by visiting www.youtube.com/yalecourses and itunes.yale.edu/ and has been accessed approximately 15 million times through these channels alone.

Apart from the United States, the greatest number of visitors to Open Yale Courses comes from China, the U.K., Canada, South Korea, Germany, Brazil, India and Australia. The number of institutions where Open Yale Courses are being used in the classroom continues to increase with institutions added in the last year including Tec of Monterrey (Mexico), CIDE (Mexico), Universidad Francisco Marroquin (Guatemala), Universidad Rafael Landivar (Guatemala), and the Getulio Vargas Foundation (Brazil). Some secondary schools such as Victoria Academy in Quito, Ecuador are now using Open Yale Courses as a mechanism for helping their students experience a U.S. university classroom and practice their English skills.

In China, Open Yale Courses has become popular with users accessing it through Ministry of Education sites, as well as postings on other Web portals. Yale has entered into an agreement with the DaVinci Learning channel, a cable television content provider based in Germany, to use Open Yale Courses as featured content on their channels in Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Ukraine, Russia, Slovakia and Slovenia, with plans to expand to other European countries.

“We are delighted that so many people around the world have accessed our Open Yale Courses,” said President Richard C. Levin. “In the new courses we are releasing today, we are taking full advantage of the latest technology to bring the learning of our distinguished faculty to students of all ages and interests.”

“These 10 new Open Yale Courses allow us to offer a full college curriculum of 35 courses reflecting the broad liberal arts education provided by Yale College to anyone with an Internet connection,” said Diana E.E. Kleiner, the Dunham Professor of the History of Art and Classics and the founding director of the project. “And there is evidence that many participants are ‘taking’ our complete courses, replicating the on-campus experience in a remarkable way.”

“To encourage the widest possible use of the courses, the license that covers most of the lectures and other material on Open Yale Courses is a “Creative Commons’ Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0” license. This license permits the free use or repurposing of the Open Yale Courses material by others. Under this license, users may download and redistribute the Open Yale Courses material, as well as remix and build upon the content to produce new lectures or other educational tools. The only restriction is that commercial use of the Open Yale Courses material is not allowed.

The new courses and their instructors are:

• “Economics 251: Financial Theory” (John Geanakoplos, the James Tobin Professor of Economics)
• “Environmental Studies 255: Environmental Politics and Law” (John Wargo, professor of forestry, environmental studies and political science)
• “History 116: American Revolution” (Joanne Freeman, professor of history)
• “History 234: Epidemics and Society in the West Since 1600” (Frank Snowden, the Andrew Downey Orrick Professor of History)
• “History 251: Early Modern England: Politics, Religion, and Society under the Tudors and Stuarts” (Keith Wrightson, the Randolph W. Townsend Jr. Professor of History)
• “Physics 201: Fundamentals of Physics II” (Ramamurti Shankar, the John Randolph Huffman Professor of Physics and Applied Physics)
• “Political Science 118: The Moral Foundations of Politics” (Ian Shapiro, Sterling Professor of Political Science)
• “Political Science 270: Capitalism: Success, Crisis and Reform” (Douglas Rae, the Richard S. Ely Professor of Management, Sociology, and Political Science)
• “Sociology 151: Foundations of Modern Social Theory” (Iván Szelényi, the William Graham Sumner Professor Emeritus of Sociology)
• “Spanish 300: Cervantes’ Don Quixote” (Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria, Sterling Professor of Spanish and Comparative Literature)

The production of these free courses for the Internet was made possible by a grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

The Open Yale Courses project is produced and supported by the Yale Center for Media and Instructional Innovation (CMI2), which promotes the innovative use of technology to enhance learning at Yale and beyond. In recognition of the initiative’s achievement, Yale was awarded an Innovation Prize at the Connecticut Quality Improvement Award Partnership’s 21st Annual Conference on Quality and Innovation in November 2008. The CQIA partnership is a non-profit corporation that brings together the private sector, state and municipal government, and the educational community to recognize organizations for their accomplishments. In December 2010, Professor Kleiner was inducted as a World Technology Network Fellow for life for her leadership of Open Yale Courses.

Previously posted courses, which are still available:

• “Astronomy: Frontiers and Controversies in Astrophysics,” Charles Bailyn
• “Chemistry: Freshman Organic Chemistry I,” J. Michael McBride
• “Classics: Introduction to Ancient Greek History,” Donald Kagan
• “Biomedical Engineering: Frontiers of Biomedical Engineering,” W. Mark Saltzman
• “Ecology and Evolutionary Biology: Principles of Evolution, Ecology, and Behavior,” Stephen Stearns
• “Economics: Game Theory,” Ben Polak
• “Economics: Financial Markets,” Robert Shiller
• “English: The American Novel Since 1945,” Amy Hungerford
• “English: Milton,” John Rogers
• “English: Modern Poetry,” Langdon Hammer
• “English: Introduction to Theory of Literature,” Paul Fry
• “History: The Civil War and Reconstruction Era, 1845-1877,” David Blight
• “History: France Since 1871,” John Merriman
• “History: European Civilization, 1648-1945,” John Merriman
• “History of Art: Roman Architecture,” Diana E.E. Kleiner
• “Italian: Dante in Translation,” Giuseppe Mazzotta
• “Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology: Global Problems of Population Growth,” Robert J. Wyman
• “Music: Listening to Music,” Craig Wright
• “Philosophy: Death,” Shelly Kagan
• “Physics: Fundamentals of Physics I,” Ramamurti Shankar
• “Political Science: Introduction to Political Philosophy,” Steven Smith
• “Psychology: Introduction to Psychology,” Paul Bloom
• “Psychology: The Psychology, Biology, and Politics of Food,” Kelly Brownell
• “Religious Studies: Introduction to the Old Testament (Hebrew Bible),” Christine Hayes
• “Religious Studies: Introduction to New Testament History and Literature Dale Martin