Thursday, July 30, 2009

Go to Yale for Free

I'm back in New England for the time being. Woke up to rain, which is precisely what these Connecticut Yankees didn't want. This July has been their wettest one on record (not counting the year they had a hurricane). Today's showers will likely push the total for the month to over 9 inches. We're hoping for sunshine this afternoon.

Anyway, sometime back Yale University began its open courses program. What's that? The homepage says, Open Yale Courses provides lectures and other materials from selected Yale College courses to the public free of charge via the internet. The courses span the full range of liberal arts disciplines, including humanities, social sciences, and physical and biological sciences.

So far, I've watched several of the segments from "Introduction to the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible" and "Introduction to Psychology."

As you'd expect, the lectures are very good to excellent. The one complaint I have is that only one camera is used, and it stays on the instructor. So when watching the videos, you can't always see the visuals (slides or chalkboard) used in the classroom. But that's a minor thing.

I've mentioned this program once before. But just recently they added several more courses and basically doubled the number. So if you didn't see something that interested you the first time, you might check it out again. Here's the Yale Open Courses homepage.

1 comment:

Leland V said...

Thanks. One of the new courses is Prof. Donald Kagan on Intro to Ancient Greek History. I have already downloaded some of the lectures and will listen in the car. I will see if he lectures as well as he writes.