By Arun Kumar, IANS
Washington : Yale, one of America’s leading universities, is making some of its most popular undergraduate courses freely available around the world through the internet with Mumbai University among the participants.
The project, called “Open Yale Courses,” allows anyone with internet access get the Yale College courses for free online, the New Haven, Connecticut based University announced Tuesday. There is no “enrolment” in the courses and Yale does not offer credit for those who use the course materials.
Individual faculty members at universities around the world will use Open Yale Courses in their classrooms. Yale also has developed partnerships to enable these resources to be widely utilised in academic settings around the world.
In India, Yale is working with the Indo-US Inter-University Collaborative Initiative in Higher Education and Research’s Amrita satellite network to broadcast courses to universities throughout India.
Other participating universities include those in Argentina, Bahrain, China, Ethiopia, Japan and Mexico.
Open Yale Courses presents unique access to the full content of a selection of college-level courses and makes them available in various formats, including downloadable and streaming video, audio only and searchable transcripts of each lecture. Syllabi, reading assignments, problem sets and other materials accompany the courses.
The seven courses in the sciences, arts and humanities-which were recorded live as they were presented in the classroom to Yale students-will be augmented with approximately 30 additional Yale courses over the next several years.
The production of the courses for the Internet was made possible by a grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, Yale said.
“Information technology allows the knowledge and passion of leading Yale faculty to reach everyone who wishes to explore these subjects,” said Yale President Richard C. Levin.
“We hope students, teachers and anyone with an interest in these topics, no matter where they live or what they do, will take full advantage of these free and easily accessed courses.”
Diana E. E. Kleiner, Dunham Professor of the History of Art and Classics and the director of the project, noted that the full content of all the courses is now readily available online and may be accessed at the users’ convenience.
“We wanted everyone to be able to see and hear each lecture as if they were sitting in the classroom. It’s exciting to make these thought-provoking courses available so broadly for free,” Kleiner said.
“While education is best built upon direct interactions between teachers and students, Yale believes that leading universities have much to contribute to making educational resources accessible to a wider audience. We hope this ongoing project will benefit countless people around the world.”
Kleiner said the courses reflect the broad liberal arts education provided by Yale College, which encourages critical thinking, intellectual exploration and creativity. She said Yale plans for future Open Yale Courses to include music and the arts.
Open Yale Courses also will offer secondary school students who are considering applying to study in the United States the opportunity to see how subjects are taught in an American university.
The URL for Open Yale Courses is: http://open.yale.edu/courses/
To encourage the widest possible use of the courses, the license that covers most of the lectures and other course material on Open Yale Courses is Creative Commons’ Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 license, the University said.
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. Commercial use of the Open Yale Courses material is prohibited.