Yale, Notre Dame Follow MIT’s Example: OpenCourseWare with Video and Audio

The Chronicle reports (subscription required) that Yale will be posting audio and video of select courses for free, for everyone on the Internet. From the Yale press release

"…The project will create multidimensional packages—including fulltranscripts in several languages, syllabi, and other coursematerials—for seven courses and design a web interface for thesematerials, to be launched in the fall of 2007…"

Wow!

The Chronicle article also mentions Notre Dame’s OpenCourseware initiative

"…Notre Dame OCW is a free and open educational resource for faculty,students, and self-learners throughout the world.

We hope you find Notre Dame OCW valuable, whether you’re a studentlooking for some extra help, a faculty member trying to prepare a newcourse, or just interested in learning more about a topic thatinterests you…."

Emphasis mine.

I am delighted to see that they recognize the value of open courseware for other faculty, not just students, because I believe that opening up education will greatly benefit education itself. We had some evidence of this in the Legal Education Podcasting Project where faculty listened to other faculty’s podcasts to improve their own teaching.

This is starting to look like a serious trend with some serious momentum. Here at CALI we are working on a similar project in the area of legal education and podcasting that we call the Legal Education Podcasting Commons. No further information available at this time as we are still in development.

One of our explcit goals, however, is to find ways to serve law faculty so that they can improve their own teaching. The tricky part is making small parts of a course or a lecture ‘findable’ so that you don’t have to wade through dozens of hours of media to find something relevant.

On the student side, we have the same problem. Students want information that will help thme with specific learning objectives and with any text-based information, you can use search engines. Audio and video searching is more problematic and so the next best thing is good metadata with links into the material.

I don’t know if MIT, Yale or Notre Dame is considering the granularity issue in their production. It’s challenging to instructors to think that their material can be taken out of context, but that’s the way students learn.

More on this later.

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