December 11, 2007
Yale U. Puts Complete Courses Online
Modern poetry, as well as introductory courses in physics, psychology, and political science, are four of seven classes from Yale U. that the institution put online today. Not only are the courses free for anyone who is interested, but they are as close to being there as online technology allows.
“These are gavel-to-gavel presentations,” Tom Conroy, a university spokesman, told The Chronicle. “We’ve put everything online that we could, and I think that’s what makes this different.” Lectures can be downloaded and run in streaming video or in audio only. There are searchable transcripts of each lecture, as well as course syllabi, reading assignments, problem sets, and other materials.
Diana E.E. Kleiner, a professor of the history of art and classics and director of the project, which is called Open Yale Courses, said in a written statement that the project’s leaders “wanted everyone to be able to see and hear each lecture as if they were sitting in the classroom.”
The courses available are:
• Astronomy 160: Frontiers and Controversies in Astrophysics, with Professor Charles Bailyn.
• English 310: Modern Poetry, with Professor Langdon Hammer.
• Philosophy 176: Death, with Professor Shelly Kagan.
• Physics 200: Fundamentals of Physics, with Professor Ramamurti Shankar.
• Political Science 114: Introduction to Political Philosophy, with Professor Steven B. Smith.
• Psychology 110: Introduction to Psychology, with Professor Paul Bloom.
• Religious Studies 145: Introduction to the Old Testament (Hebrew Bible), with Professor Christine Hayes.
The project also has international connections, with Open Yale Courses lectures broadcast over Chinese television and a satellite network in India. The lectures will also be available at 300 libraries and universities throughout the world, via a U.S. State Department project called American Corners. —Josh Fischman
Posted on Tuesday December 11, 2007 | Permalink |Comments
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These are not online courses. They are face to face course material placed online. It’s nice for reference but don’t call them courses…more like course material.
— Patrick Dec 11, 05:00 PM #
I just took a quick look at the astronomy, philosophy, physics, and poli sci pages, and they look a lot more complete and interesting than most of the online “materials” I’ve used at mit.edu. I hope they put more-advanced courses on the site.
— S. Britchky Dec 12, 02:56 AM #
And, to Yale’s credit, the texts provided online are either public domain or have been properly permissioned. Check out the course on modern poetry in particular.
— Sandy Thatcher Dec 12, 07:41 AM #
I would agree that these are course materials, not online courses. One could read / view / reflect on these materials, but what’s not available is the feedback on one’s performance / learning that’s provided by an instructor. Without that student-teacher interaction, engaging with these online materials is more akin to reading a book, not taking a college course. Still, it’s nice to see these materials made available.
— Derek Dec 12, 09:05 AM #
I will be dead soon. Still it is nice to dream about a world all of whose people publish courses on what they know and do best for all the rest of the world’s people to learn from—a giant single phone conversation with video, where we all talk to all of us, about things that matter the most. It is such a towering dream yet in my short lifetime it is actually coming true! When I was born I would never have believed such a thing was possible. In my short lifetime it became actual! Life is amazing. Yale is taking MIT one step further—which was MIT’s original dream—to start making universities, well, how to say it, universal rather than merely rich like Harvard (and greedy).
— Richard Tabor Greene Dec 12, 09:07 AM #
This is great! Boola! Boola! available for everyone!
— Denis Tippo Dec 12, 10:29 AM #
Yale is still making a common but incorrect assumption – that teaching equals lecture. They are still stuck in the 1950’s when it comes to making this assumption. When faculty ask me “how do I lecture online?”, I answer “You don’t. There are other, more effective ways to teach online.”
Yale will eventually learn this. it’s just tiring to see yet another set of faculty making assumptions based on a lack of knowledge about matching teaching techniques to the media used.
— Al Dec 12, 11:05 AM #
I am sorry to be posting as anonymous, but I admit that I actually laughed out loud when I read this. I’ve been facilitating online education for many years and this is exactly the sort of thing we tell instructors NOT to do, i.e. point a camera at themselves and put the recording of a lecture online. I am very saddened and frustrated to see a great institution like Yale doing such a silly thing. What a sad waste of resources.
I mentioned this to my husband (who is a tenured professor), and he and I agreed that as undergrads, we cut as many lecture sections as we could get away with. They were boring and didn’t add to the learning process. I didn’t really miss those lectures; I graduated at the top of my class and Phi Beta Kappa at a university comparable in prestige to Yale.
On the other hand, highly interactive seminars were wonderful and I only missed those if I was extremely ill. High interactivity is also what makes an online class interesting and stimulating, thus leading to a superior educational experience.
For really excellent free online course materials, check out Carnegie Mellon’s online learning initiative materials at http://www.cmu.edu/oli/index.html
— Anonymous Dec 12, 12:55 PM #
I recommend Yale Open Course looks at www.wiziq.com technology to deliver its open courses on the web.
— Mark Cruthers Dec 12, 01:50 PM #
I would go along with Al and Anonymous IF this is being presented as “online courses”, which the Chronicle article suggests. However, the Yale web site suggests that this is open material, not courses per se. As open material, the “lectures” are interesting but not as the article suggests close to being there. I found it annoying that many of the presenters are using powerpoints or other materials that the new audience cannot see. And there are many applications that allow for synchronized narration of presentation material. Personally, I applaud any professor providing material in multiple ways, but this should only be viewed as supplemental material for personal online learning, not as online courses for credit.
— Britt Watwood Dec 12, 04:31 PM #
Huzzah to Yale for posting undoubtedly superb examples representing the pinnacle of university teaching in the nineteenth century! I anticipate having a ball watching several of them. Meanwhile, back in the twenty-first century world, there is a growing understanding, based on real research, that the traditional lecture is near the bottom of the effectiveness-ranked list of pedagogical methodologies, and several institutions are offering complete online degree programs in numbers ten times Yale’s courses.
— Don Langenberg Dec 12, 05:42 PM #
It’s probably important to distinguish here between “online courses” and what Yale has offered here on the web as “Open Courses.” Open in the sense that they give us interesting opportunities to see what gets valued in terms of distributing “instructional content” on the open web. One thing I wish they’d consider is including some measure of interactivity and social exchange around the courses they have posted.
For example, it might be of value to learners interested in the courses to have the chance to engage with each other through a d-board, live chat of those currently viewing or an extended social network surrounding the course. Perhaps then we might see how this kind of public access content could move from a top-down model of learning to one that is more socially engaged.
— Jeff Nugent Dec 12, 08:15 PM #
Britt Watwood’s point is well taken – these are not online courses in the sense of courses offered for credit, but online course resources. However, this is a fine point that will be lost on mostly anybody except DL specialists. To most people, an online course IS online course material. If even the Wired Campus blog can’t make that distinction, can we expect general consumers of this sort of material to be able to do so?
Also, even the Yale page is ambiguous. The “about” page describes these as “online courses” and indicates that these materials allow a person to audit a Yale course.
Among other things, I am concerned that people will come to equate these kinds of resources with other “real” online classes and thus see online classes as inferior to traditional classroom based study.
— Anonymous Dec 12, 09:56 PM #
I sense more than a bit of defensiveness on the part of some of the commenters, who pat themselves heartily on the back for knowing better how to teach online than stone-age Yale profs. These are not online courses for credit; these are archives of actual lectures offered by some very stimulating professors, along the lines of what The Teaching Company produces (for pretty sizeable fees!). Auditing a course can mean nothing more than sitting in the back of a lecture hall and learning a thing or two. What’s the problem? Yale should be congratulated for making an effort to share with the world, but you would guess from some of the previous comments that Yale has done something totally offensive. Get some perspective, folks!
— Ingrid C. Dec 13, 09:13 AM #
I have not yet looked at any of the material from Yale, so I don’t know exactly what is being posted. However, I think all of us who look at this material, or are going to look at this material, need to take this information in the context of John Seely Brown’s audio interview also posted on the Wired Campus Blog. If people are interested in the information that Yale posts, they will come to that information and learn on their own, in their own way. Brown makes some interesting remarks about what he calls “tinkering” – playing with knowledge. This “course information” allows for that kind of tinkering. Brown’s ideas also relate well to Marc Prensky’s thoughts on “Digital Natives.” The new breed of student, the “Digital Natives” will learn on their own, no matter what the presentation style is. We all have to get information somewhere, and I applaud Yale for make more information available.
— sudy Dec 13, 12:11 PM #
Anonymous wrote, “To most people, an online course IS online course material.” This is an astute observation. People who have actively taken online courses (especially well-designed, highly interactive and engaging courses)—as well as people who work passionately to develop better ways to design and deliver online courses—have an inside understanding of how true online education works.
People who have never actively engaged in that system often have an imperfect understanding of what it means or how it works. I earned a Master’s degree in Library Science, and fully 90% of my classes were Internet-based DL classes. Many friends and family, when told that I was taking “online classes,” thought this meant that I was given a list of reading material and assignments and left to complete things in my own way, on my own time, at my own pace, with no feedback and no deadlines, just submitting everything by semester end. They joked, “Oh, you could just sit down and take all the quizzes in one week and be done.”
They viewed it like the old snail-mail correspondence courses that some of us took in high school (anyone remember those?). They didn’t understand that real DL involves as much (if not more) need for structure and interactivity as classroom-based education.
— erin Dec 13, 04:43 PM #
The Open Yale courses may be of some benefit as resources. The approach appears to be deficient in three main respects, however: the quality of delivery in the video lectures; the notion that these video lectures + ancillary materials constitute “courses” (and they are billed as courses on the Open Yale web site); and the notion that these courses represent anything near state-of-the-art in online delivery. (More commentary is on my web site at senerlearning.com).
— jsener Dec 14, 05:43 PM #
The blog of jsener complains that the video does not show the lecture slides. how many professors display slides with copyright protected items in their classrooms? Open Yale website says that some lecture materials could not be included because of copyright restrictions. I for one would rahter get some of the materials even if not everything, than to get nothing. Anonymous might laugh, but these materials are a great gift to people across the world.
— José Dec 15, 09:01 AM #
Fascinating exchange here, yet I’d interject that criticism is quite easy, and when accompanied by supercilious laughter, really quite ungenerous. I look forward to seeing advocates of alternative pedagogical approaches get up from their armchairs and join the open educational movement. Let’s get beyond debates on terminology (are these real courses?) and instead start building new learning communities together, utilising the strengths each of us can bring to the movement. Yale has made a generous contribution to this effort; why not see it in the spirit it has been offered, as a resource to be used by people of various learning styles as they deem most useful? If you believe that moderated fora are instrumental to proper learning, why not initiate one around a video lecture or two? Opening rigorous educational opportunities to the entire world will take a great deal of effort, commitment and cooperation from all of us.
— Helen Dec 16, 10:15 PM #
The anonymous person who “laughed out loud” also offered a specific alternative (the Carnegie Mellon resources), which IMO is actually rather generous.
The criticism is “quite easy” because there is a lot to criticize. Faculty at many institutions are refusing to do online learning because they think it’s not good. In many cases, it’s because they been exposed to a video delivery format similar to Open Yale’s; they come to equate online learning with video lectures and then are turned off when the results are (naturally) disappointing.
The discussion about “courses” is also useful and necessary because Open Yale markets their offerings as courses. This helps feed false perceptions about the quality of online learning which arguably have a net negative effect on access to online education.
Re my criticism of Open Yale’s exclusion of slides et al., online learning has received unremitting criticism since its inception about its limitations such as lack of facial cues, voice inflections, etc. Open Yale lectures have limitations (in this case legal) which even more severely limit their capacities, cutting out not just blackboard notes or slides but student interaction entirely. Why should this be ignored or not criticized as a damaging limitation?
As to joining the open education movement, that sounds like a good idea. Perhaps Helen could supply a resource that could get interested parties started? I couldn’t find an easy entry point in ten+ minutes of online searching — I found a course (Intro to Open Education) which is no longer accessible, and the wikipedia entry on Open Educational Resources (which looks a bit different). and a lot of other talk about it. Perhaps you could suggest a better entry point?
— jsener Dec 17, 10:58 AM #
I’ve watched 3 religion lectures at Yale online thus far. These discussions were superbly articulated. I highly recommend them to anyone.
— len Dec 23, 08:03 PM #