Open Yale Courses

What it is

Open Yale Courses (OYC) "provides free and open access to a selection of introductory courses taught by distinguished teachers and scholars at Yale University." The About page describes it as lectures and other materials from selected Yale College courses, offered to the public free of charge over the internet, spanning the liberal arts: humanities, social sciences, and the physical and biological sciences. The stated aim is "to expand access to educational materials for all who wish to learn."

The site is clear about who it is for. The courses, it says, "are designed for a wide range of people around the world, among them self-directed and life-long learners, educators, and high school and college students." Its web interface lets users, in effect, audit Yale undergraduate courses, and also download, redistribute and remix the materials.

Three points sit at the top of the home page: all lectures were recorded in the Yale College classroom and are available in video, audio and text transcript formats; registration is not required; and no course credit, degree or certificate is available through the site.

What each course includes

Every course comes with a full set of class lectures produced in high-quality video, along with other course materials such as syllabi, suggested readings, exams and problem sets. The lectures can be downloaded as video files, an audio-only version is offered, and each lecture has a searchable transcript, which makes it easy to find a passage or read instead of watch.

A course page is organized into three tabs: About, Syllabus and Sessions. Philosophy and the Science of Human Nature (PHIL 181) with Tamar Gendler shows what that looks like in practice. The About tab explains that the course pairs central texts of the Western philosophical tradition, including Plato, Aristotle, Epictetus, Hobbes, Kant, Mill, Rawls and Nozick, with recent findings in cognitive science, organized around three sets of topics: happiness and flourishing, morality and justice, and political legitimacy and social structures. It also notes that the course was taught on campus twice a week for 50 minutes and recorded in Spring 2011. The Syllabus tab lists the required texts, among them Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, Plato's Republic and Jonathan Haidt's The Happiness Hypothesis, plus a long course packet of articles and talks. It also keeps the original requirements for Yale students: ten brief directed exercises, two short essays of approximately 1000 words each, and a final exam, with the grading weights. The Sessions tab runs through 26 lectures, from "The Ring of Gyges: Morality and Hypocrisy" to "The Trolley Problem", "The Prisoner's Dilemma" and "Censorship". An online viewer gets the same reading list and assignments to work through alone.

The catalog

The Courses page is a sortable table listing each course's department, course number, title, professor and the term it was recorded, from Fall 2006 to Fall 2011. The range is broad:

• Sciences: Frontiers and Controversies in Astrophysics, Frontiers of Biomedical Engineering, Freshman Organic Chemistry I and II, Principles of Evolution, Ecology and Behavior, Fundamentals of Physics I and II with Ramamurti Shankar, The Atmosphere, the Ocean, and Environmental Change, and Global Problems of Population Growth.
• Economics and social sciences: Financial Markets with Robert J. Shiller (recorded in both 2008 and 2011), Financial Theory with John Geanakoplos, Game Theory with Ben Polak, Introduction to Psychology with Paul Bloom, The Psychology, Biology and Politics of Food, Introduction to Political Philosophy with Steven B. Smith, Capitalism: Success, Crisis, and Reform, Foundations of Modern Social Theory, and Environmental Politics and Law.
• History: Introduction to Ancient Greek History, The Early Middle Ages, Early Modern England under the Tudors and Stuarts, European Civilization, France Since 1871, The American Revolution, The Civil War and Reconstruction Era, Epidemics in Western Society Since 1600, and African American History: From Emancipation to the Present.
• Literature, philosophy, religion and art: Death with Shelly Kagan, Dante in Translation, Cervantes' Don Quixote, Milton, Modern Poetry, The American Novel Since 1945, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Introduction to Theory of Literature, introductions to the Old and New Testaments, and Roman Architecture with Diana E. E. Kleiner.

Two courses have left the site. The Courses page says Craig Wright's Introduction to Classical Music and Ian Shapiro's Moral Foundations of Political Philosophy were removed, updated and moved to Coursera, where Yale's courses can be taken for free.

Earning credit elsewhere

Credit is not available on OYC itself, but the About page points to one route. Two courses from the project can be taken for Yale College credit through Yale Summer Online: Listening to Music with Craig Wright and Milton with John Rogers. Those are taught online to admitted students, and the site says both "feature extensive interaction with faculty and fellow students."

License

Most lectures and course materials are published under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 license. Under it, anyone may download and redistribute the material or remix, tweak and build upon it to produce new lectures or other work, as long as the use is non-commercial, Yale and the relevant faculty member are credited as the originators, and the new work is licensed under identical terms. Third-party material may carry more restrictive terms, and the site tells users to check each lecture's Credits section. For teachers, this is a practical benefit: lectures and materials can be reused in their own courses within those terms.

Who runs it

Diana E. E. Kleiner, Dunham Professor of History of Art and Classics and former Deputy Provost, is the Founding Project Director and Principal Investigator. Her welcome message says the lectures and materials "reflect the values of a Yale liberal arts education." The About page names a small project team alongside Yale's CMI2 team, broadcast and media staff, and student assistants. The project is supported by a grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation through its Open Educational Resources initiative, and the home page also credits Yale's Center for Teaching and Learning. General and technical questions go to the site's Help section.

Who it suits

Open Yale Courses suits independent learners who want complete Yale lecture courses, not short clips, in subjects from organic chemistry and physics to game theory, philosophy and Dante, with nothing to sign up for. Educators get openly licensed material they can adapt. High school and college students can preview or supplement a subject with a full semester of lectures and the original syllabus.

The limits are the ones the site states. There is no credit, degree or certificate, and the recordings date from 2006 to 2011, so learners who want a credential or interaction should look to the Yale Summer Online courses or Yale's Coursera offerings instead.