Get a Yale education—for free!

Posted by Suzy Vitello Soulé on June 10th, 2010 at 08:57 AM |

Thanks to generous funding from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the Yale Center for Media and Instructional Innovation, anyone with Internet connection can “audit” an intro level course at Yale.  Yup—that Yale.  Here’s a tidbit about the how and why:

Open Yale Courses provides free and open access to a selection of 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 the lectures and other course materials on this site will be a resource for critical thinking, creative imagination, and intellectual exploration. All lectures were recorded in the Yale College classroom and are available in video, audio, and text transcript format. Registration is not required and no course credit is available.

Courses span the educational and alphabetical continuum from Astronomy to Religious Studies.

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