Well, it happened: Yale University now offers free online courses for anyone interested in learning online.

You can get text notes, listen to audio, or watch the lectures on streaming video:

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.

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.

This is welcome,
incredible, news — and it begins the assault on lesser-know colleges
and universities across the world — as Yale becomes the first of the
big Ivy League schools to move so fully and so dramatically into
interactive online teaching.

This step for Yale tests their toe in the online learning water.

When Yale are satisfied, they will begin to offer distance courses for credit.

Then,
the slow death begins for local colleges and universities as brick and
mortal buildings give way to Yale University Online.

If
you could get a Yale education without having to leave the comfort of
your bedroom, you’d do it, we’d do it, the world will do it.

We
admire Yale for getting this right so fast and for setting a dangerous
— yet brilliant — stage for the future of advanced education.