This discovery just in:

“Open Yale Courses provides free and open access to seven 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.”URL: http://open.yale.edu/courses/index.html

Wow, ok this is impressive. The few course sessions I looked at included MP3 audio downloads, streaming video, video downloads (hi and lo bandwidth), and HTML transcripts. I haven’t looked at the quality of the video yet, but George Siemens indicates they have “Great video quality and talented presenters.”

There also seems to be surveys, syllabii, and other misc downloads available. Quite a comprehensive package really – and all offered under a Creative Commons license.

The site is Plone powered too I might add.

It’s fantastic to see the gradual trend in higher education to openly share course materials with the general public – and in the case of universities like Yale to devote so much attention to detail and quality. It’s a testimony to their dedication to education and it doesn’t hurt their profile either.

Siemens indicates his one complaint was a lack of two way interactivity between people accessing the material, which effectively renders the site a one-directional source of information. All the same it’s a fantastic example of mixed-format information dissemination using both digital and traditional media (e.g. print based) and hopefully yet another step towards a more open international university system without walls.