Inside Higher Education reports on Yale's project to make selected course lectures openly available to non-registered students and calls the project "The Next Step in Open Source." Of course, lecture materials have been made available from other universities such as MIT, Harvard, and UC Berkeley, so Yale's decision is not the first step in this direction, but it is important as part of the opencourseware movement to have a major university supported by a major foundation (Hewlett) commit to making full lecture materials systematically available for some of its courses. Instructors and students outside Yale who access the materials will undoubtedly benefit from having more content than they could find in just syllabi, quizzes, and course notes. _____JH
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"In 2001, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology started placing materials for its courses online--and making them available for anyone to use, at no cost. OpenCourseWare, which currently contains materials for 1,400 courses, has been a huge success, and thousands of people use the MIT materials each day.
The MIT project and others like it--such as Connexions, at Rice University--are based on the model of putting curricular materials online, but not the actual courses (although a few professors at MIT, Rice and elsewhere have put videos of their lectures online).
On Tuesday, Yale University announced that it would be starting a version of an open access online tool for those seeking to gain from its courses. But the basis of the Yale effort will be video of actual courses--every lecture of the course, to be combined with selected class materials. The money behind the Yale effort is coming from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, which was an early backer of MIT’s project, and which sees the Yale project as a way to take the open course idea to the next level."
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