18 October 2006 // Yale Joins Effort to Broaden Access to Education on the Internet
Menlo Park, CA - Starting next fall, would-be students anywhere in the world will be able to sample part of a Yale University education when the institution makes available on the Internet video lectures and related course materials for seven of its undergraduate courses.
The pilot project is being underwritten with $755,000 from The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. It will include transcripts of the lectures translated into several languages, the course syllabi and related course material, all available at a Web site designed for the purpose.
"We believe presenting these courses in such a robust and accessible format will attract a diverse audience," said Richard C. Levin, president of Yale University. "The courses can be enriching for those who have completed their formal education, and they can benefit teachers and students at any level interested in the subject matter and how it is taught at a leading university."
The first three courses to be offered, which are being videotaped this fall, are Introduction to the Old Testament, Fundamentals of Physics and Introduction to Political Philosophy. In spring, four additional courses will be videotaped in three more subjects: astronomy, psychology and English. Yale expects eventually to expand the offerings to include several dozen courses.
The pilot program, called the Open Educational Resources Video Lecture Project, will run for eighteen months. Yale hopes its efforts will be a spur to other institutions, said Diana E. E. Kleiner, professor of the history of art and classics, who is directing the project.
"Our goal is to make core lecture content from selected introductory Yale College courses available with the hope that our enthusiasm for sharing it worldwide will spark others to participate in the movement" Kleiner said. "The open educational resources movement has the potential to transform teaching and learning on a global scale."
With the video lecture project, Yale joins a burgeoning international movement to provide educational materials on the Internet that the Hewlett Foundation helped pioneer more than four years ago. Since then, the Foundation has disbursed more than $60 million in grants to support programs worldwide that advance the promise of open educational resources—or OER, as it is known to educators.
Behind the efforts of the Foundation and participating institutions like Yale are the beliefs that sharing the world's knowledge and education are a common good and that geography and limited resources should not be barriers to anyone's desire to learn or teach.
"Broader access to knowledge is critical not just to individuals, but to the collective prosperity of the world," said Marshall Smith, director of the Education Program at the Hewlett Foundation. "Yale's program is an important step in broadening that access."
As a practical matter, such sharing combines the technologies that make educational materials accessible with the legal innovations that address copyright and intellectual property laws so materials can be freely obtained—even reorganized and republished—by users around the world. Crucial to the Foundation's vision of open educational resources is that users can add their own content, adapt others' content and republish material to suit their own needs.
Individual Foundation-funded efforts vary widely but share the goals of assuring that the material is of high quality, free and reusable. The Foundation also is developing relationships with the World Bank, UNESCO and other international institutions to expand the use of open educational resources, and is funding the development of two Internet portals to gather these resources in common, searchable locations.
Among the projects that the Foundation has underwritten are MIT's OpenCourseWare program, which has published virtually all MIT courses on the program's Web site; Carnegie Mellon University's Open Learning Initiative, a highly interactive approach designed to measure the effectiveness of the teaching; African Virtual University's Open Distance and eLearning Initiative, which provides digital and printable material to train teachers in sub-Saharan Africa; and Creative Commons, a nonprofit organization that helps creators of intellectual property preserve a range of rights while sharing content.
Courses in the Yale video lecture project require no registration and are downloadable and free to all. Completion of a course does not offer credit toward a degree at Yale, nor do courses include an opportunity to interact with Yale faculty. For answers to more frequently asked questions about the program, visit the Yale Web site.
For a fuller discussion of the potential and challenges of OER, read " The Promise of Open Educational Resources," an article that Hewlett Foundation Education Program Director Marshall Smith and Program Officer Catherine Casserly wrote for Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning.
About The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation
The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation has been making grants since 1966 to help solve social and environmental problems at home and around the world. The Foundation concentrates its resources on activities in education, the environment, global development, performing arts, philanthropy and population, and makes grants to support disadvantaged communities in the San Francisco Bay Area. A full list of all the Hewlett Foundation's grants can be found at the Web site.
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