Open courseware at Yale and Notre Dame

Jeffrey Young, Yale U. Plans to Offer Some Course Materials, Including Lecture Videos, Free Online, Chronicle of Higher Education, September 20, 2006 (accessible only to subscribers).  Excerpt:

Cameras are rolling in Yale University classrooms this fall, as part of a project to make video recordings of several courses available free for anyone to view online.

Yale is the latest institution to pledge to create "open courseware," in which detailed material from courses is placed online in the hopes that it will be used by educators and students elsewhere. Open courseware was pioneered by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which in 2001 announced plans to put material for nearly all of its courses online.

Yale plans to start out slowly, publishing materials from seven courses by the fall of 2007. After that, the project might expand if it is deemed a success. The effort is supported by a $755,000 grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation....

In an announcement on Tuesday, Yale officials said that the university would be the first to offer complete sets of videos along with its open courses. But Anne H. Margulies, executive director of MIT's OpenCourseWare Initiative, said MIT already has 26 courses online that include full sets of lecture videos. The institute has materials available for more than 1,400 courses, though most focus on text, such as lecture notes.

The idea of systematically publishing course materials online for use by those outside the university has grown slowly in recent years. Leaders from MIT and other colleges recently formed the Open Courseware Consortium, made up of educational institutions worldwide that have pledged to place complete course materials for at least 10 courses online....The University of Notre Dame, which is a member of the consortium, unveiled its first eight open courses this week.

Terri L. Bays, director of the open-courseware project at Notre Dame, said the university planned to publish materials for 30 courses within two years, with the support of a $232,800 grant from the Hewlett Foundation. Within the next 10 years, she hopes that two-thirds of the university's courses will be free online....