Education going Freeware

Yale University is in the process of putting up select undergraduate courses for free on the Internet through a grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. The courses and designing a web interface for these course is to be completed by fall of 2007.

The Open Educational Resources Video Lecture Project has received $755,000 for an 18-month pilot phase. The project will create multidimensional packages—including full transcripts in several languages, syllabi, and other course materials—for seven courses and design a web interface for these materials, to be launched in the fall of 2007. If the venture proves successful, Yale hopes to significantly expand its online offerings over the next few years. The new venture joins a growing number of university-based initiatives that use the Internet to make educational materials widely available.

While MIT’s OpenCourseWare model has been widely emulated, Yale will be the first university to tap the potential of digital video by combining course architecture with essentially complete sets of lectures from these courses, as presented by its faculty.