Qijun Pan (18) is settling down to a physics lecture. As he watches Yale professor Ramamurti Shankar scribbles a series of formulae across the blackboard.
Pan is not actually sitting in the lecture hall — he is in his bedroom in Shanghai, more than 10 000km away from New Haven, Connecticut, where the university is located.
You don’t have to be in the United States (US) to take part — or even be registered with the university. ”It makes sense in the era of globalisation and in a time of global information to make the knowledge we create more available and more broad-ranging,” says Diana Kleiner, director of the Open Yale courses and a professor of history of art and classics at Yale (open.yale.edu/courses). ”It seems to us that a university like ours has a responsibility to continue to democratise knowledge.”
Seven departments — astronomy, English, philosophy, physics, political science, psychology and religious studies — offer introductory courses via the website that anyone anywhere in the world can take part in via the internet.
Students looking to build on their studies, parents seeking to expand their knowledge or retirees wishing to keep mentally active can all log on to the seminars that bring them face to face with Yale’s top lecturers. Along with the video lessons students are offered audio materials and supplementary transcripts to assist their learning.
The structure, reading notes and homework assignments given out on the courses are the same as those given to any student on campus, making the lessons as authentic as possible.
Kleiner says that when the idea was brought to the table the organisers made it clear that all the professors who took part would be on camera. No remote cameras are used and the filming is all done manually to capture fully the atmosphere of the lectures. And there are no concessions made for the camera, nor are corners cut: the aim is to convey the individual style of each professor.
”This is a real opportunity for people across the world to come in and experience the feel of our classrooms,” says Kleiner. ”Part of the engagement of this project was keeping the individual teaching methods of each faculty. So, with the physics lectures, for example, we follow the professor as he roams around the classroom and get right in there with the students.”
Students also benefit from that commitment to individual style, adds Kleiner. ”Students are able to create their own activity by downloading and remixing the course materials to suit them.”
The most striking feature of the Open Yale courses is how easily they fit into hectic schedules. After a busy week at work and a rather lively Friday night out, a weekend of lectures may not sound like the most appealing idea.
However, on Saturday morning as I sit in my living room in Highbury, having just crawled out of bed, I find myself logging on to the site. A few clicks away and it is surprising how effortless it feels to take in a few lessons on modern poetry at my leisure and feel a bit more cultured on a lazy Saturday that might otherwise have been unproductive.
Through the courses Yale has established partnerships with universities around the world in countries including Mexico and China. The Yale courses do not count as credits towards a degree with the university, but the partnerships mean that the other institutions can build Yale-standard education into their own provision.
Raul Morilo, a high-school physics teacher from Ecuador, often uses the courses as part of his class. ”The lecturers are very clear,” he says. ”And some of them have a great sense of humour. It really feels like you are there in the classroom. They’re so easy to follow because they’re constantly giving you examples to work with.”
He adds that Open Yale allows many of his students to experience what the subject might be like at university level. ”Also, we do not have much money or equipment here to teach more than the basics,” he says.
But while virtual learning may seem like the next easy and natural step for global, accessible education, the programme has had to overcome a few obstacles.
”The internet materials that we use don’t always belong to us,” says Kleiner. ”So it’s raised questions on how we might deliver them. A lot of the modern poetry, for instance, is already on the internet, but due to property rights we have to be careful what we can put up on our sites.”
It may be some time before this type of education becomes the norm, but Kleiner and the other professors have been overwhelmed by the response. ”I find it enormously moving reading feedback from people who haven’t had the chance to get a high-school diploma who have taken up our courses,” she says.
Back in Shanghai, Pan says: ”It’s exciting to learn more and see differences in education systems. In China the teacher takes the major role and you listen to him. From the look of these courses students in the US are encouraged to take more notes. I like the discussion part of the lectures very much.”
”It is rewarding to hear that people think that taking our courses is an asset to their CVs or knowledge,” says Kleiner. ”We are a university that encourages leadership, so we need to be a leader in education.” —