YaleNews | Seven new Open Yale Courses now available free online

The Class of 1987’s own Tamar Gendler is the professor of one of Yale’s new open courses.  Can’t wait to take Professor Gender’s class.  Click below for more details!

Seven new Yale College courses — in subjects ranging from the great 20th-century American novelists and the philosophy of human nature to financial markets and organic chemistry — have been added to Open Yale Courses, the University's open educational initiative. The content for each of these courses is available for free to anyone with access to the Internet.

The seven courses, along with 35 posted previously, are featured on a redesigned website, which offers many new user-friendly options and is optimized for mobile devices. Participants may select courses by professor, course title, and recording date, and watch lecture videos directly from their browsers with the most up-to-date embedded video format. Chapters highlighting key lecture topics have been added to the videos and transcripts, allowing users to navigate forward and backward with greater ease.

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 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. Users have the option of downloading video and audio files of Open Yale Courses to follow at their convenience. 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 3.8 million unique visits since its debut in December 2007 and has delivered over 40 million page views since May 2009. 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.

The material has been accessed approximately 27 million times through these channels alone. Apart from the United States, the greatest number of visitors to Open Yale Courses comes from China, the United Kingdom, Canada, South Korea, Germany, Brazil, India, Russia, Australia, and Taiwan.

The new courses and their instructors are:

• “African American Studies 162: African American History: From Emancipation to the Present” (Jonathan Holloway, professor of history, African American studies, and American studies)

• “American Studies 246: Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald” (Wai Chee Dimock, the William Lampson Professor of English and American studies)

• “Chemistry 125b: Freshman Organic Chemistry II” (J. Michael McBride, the Richard M. Colgate Professor of Chemistry)

• “Economics 252: Financial Markets–2011” (Robert Shiller, the Arthur M. Okun Professor of Economics)

• “Geology and Geophysics 140: Atmosphere, Ocean, and Environmental Change” (Ronald Smith, the Damon Wells Professor of Geology and Geophysics)

• “History 210: The Early Middle Ages, 284-1000” (Paul H. Freedman, the Chester D. Tripp Professor of History)

• “Philosophy 181: Philosophy and the Science of Human Nature” (Tamar Gendler, professor of philosophy and cognitive science)

YaleNews | Seven new Open Yale Courses now available free online