We were looking at the recent redesign of Yale Undergraduate Admissions website, masterminded by our dear friend Pamela Hovland, when we stumbled upon an unexpected trove at a distant constellation of Yale’s site that is not part of the redesign: Open Yale Courses. These are free for-real Yale courses that have been recorded and archived for anyone to access via the internet, as video or plain audio. Subjects range from Astronomy to Economics to Physics to Religious Studies. This list of courses outlines Yale’s limited, but potent, offerings.  We’ve been listening to ‘Financial Markets’ given by Professor Robert Shiller in Spring of 2008, before the crash as the markets were beginning to slide. Shiller is the guy that wrote Irrational Exuberance, which viewed the pre-crash market as a speculative bubble awaiting correction.

Then we googled “free courses university” and found OpenCulture.com which lists courses available from universities all over the country. There is an amazing array…We love sampling subjects we’ve always wondered about, in the scholarly route of a college course.

What would you like to learn?

If you’ve found illumination, joy, or inspiration in this post, please consider supporting Improvised Life. It only takes a minute to make a secure donation that helps pay our many costs. A little goes a long way towards helping Improvised Life continue to live ad-free in the world.

Support Improvised Life ♥

7 replies on “free, open university courses

  1. Okay, just to be clear, I recently redesigned the website for Yale’s Undergraduate Admissions office – found at http://admissions.yale.edu. The Open Courses page you found is NOT part of that new website but rather another piece of the constellation of sites that make up the University’s sporadic online experience. But more importantly, there are HUNDREDS of offerings for online courses available through iTunesU – from Yale and other great schools. It truly is amazing to be able to listen in on these lectures, especially at 4am when you cannot sleep, which is my current state of affairs…

  2. Pamela, we’re sorry, we didn’t realize the distinction AND neglected to give a link and picture to the page. So we’ve clarified it in the post. Our apologies.

  3. Your blog is wonderful. Thank you for sharing this information. We are so lucky to live in this particular time period! As long as you are curious there is so much to learn and available to anyone who has access to a computer.

  4. This is great! I will check out those Yale courses and the itunesU podcasts, too. Thanks for posting!

  5. I am amazed at the accessibility the web brings. People for whom college isn’t an option can learn anything through the Internet. Programs like this have the potential to radically shift education in America (and abroad), if used and promoted efficiently. Kudos to universities presenting these opportunities.

  6. we homeschool and our teenage son has made extensive use of MIT OpenCourseWare for free online class materials. it’s amazing.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *