The Open Yale site now contains seven courses in seven different subject areas and has received positive attention from many bloggers (see, e.g., ZaidLearn, Kapp Notes, OpenCulture, Mission to Learn, and elearnspace) and from the Chronicle of Higher Education. The attention is well deserved because Yale is definitely moving the standard forward for open educational resources; they provide full video lectures for all the courses, plus the usual syllabi.
Yale makes us want even more, of course: forum or chat sessions for online participants, online texts, online exams, better video captures of the in-lecture displays, and so on. It's telling that we can now have such high expectations for free resources. The era of open educational resources is progressing, not as fast as some of us might want, but still moving toward more and better offerings from more institutions. It's desirable at this stage that the OER movement is diverse with multiple models, with some institutions emphasizing quantity and some emphasizing quality.
Perhaps we will someday reach the stage when every teacher expects to have his/her lectures openly available online and is expected to learn enough educational technology to literately present those lectures. Video and computer literacy may begin to match up with library literacy as a routine expectation for teaching professionals. ____JH
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"Open Yale Courses provides free and open access to seven introductory courses taught by distinguished teachers and scholars at Yale University. The aim of the project is to expand access to educational materials for all who wish to learn. Open Yale Courses reflects the values of a liberal arts education. Yale's philosophy of teaching and learning begins with the aim of training a broadly based, highly disciplined intellect without specifying in advance how that intellect will be used. This approach goes beyond the acquisition of facts and concepts to cultivate skills and habits of rigorous, independent thought: the ability to analyze, to ask the next question, and to begin the search for an answer. We hope these courses will be a resource for critical thinking, creative imagination, and intellectual exploration"
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