Yale Offers Free Online Course Access

Yale University students for years have flocked to a philosophy course titled "Death," where they reflect on their own mortality, debate whether immortality would be more desirable, and ponder what it means to die.

In a new push to open its doors to a wider audience, the Ivy League school for the first time is offering the entire "Death" course and some of its other popular undergraduate classes for free online for anyone to audit.

Videos and syllabi for classes in modern poetry, physics, political philosophy, astrophysics, and the Old Testament, as well as searchable transcripts of each lecture, can be downloaded from a Web site, open.yale.edu.

Yale is also making a push in India and China to broadcast the lectures on television, and it is working with universities in Bahrain, Buenos Aires, Ghana, Ethiopia, Mexico, and Japan to incorporate the lectures into courses there. The university is planning to broadcast 30 more courses, including music and art classes, over the Web in the next few years, officials said.

"I grew up in India, and it would have been exciting to hear a professor from a place like Yale give a lecture," a professor of physics whose introductory class will be offered online, Ramamurti Shankar, said.

Using the Internet to share intellectual resources is a trend growing in popularity at top-tier schools in America. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has made 90% of its courses available online with OpenCourseWare software. Harvard University now broadcasts some lectures and events on a Web site, Athome.Harvard.edu. Some professors say the program could encourage students to skip class to watch lectures from their dorm rooms. "The video is like a trailer — it's just a glimpse of life at Yale. You can't ask questions, talk to classmates," Mr. Shankar said. "But if some kid wants to pay $45,000 and skip class, there's nothing we can do."

To protect student privacy, the courses are shot from the backs of the lecture halls. Students who appear in footage of a small seminar course that will be posted later this year online signed a waiver. The program at Yale is funded by a grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and professors who agreed to have their lectures filmed were each compensated with $5,000 in research funds.