Online Learning for Alumni
Yale currently offers online courses on a variety of platforms including Coursera, Open Yale Courses, YouTube, and iTunes U. Yale’s philosophy of teaching and learning begins with the goal of providing a broadly based and highly disciplined approach to higher education.
Yale on Coursera:
Yale has partnered with Coursera, a MOOC platform, to amplify the impact of great teaching beyond the campus. Coursera allows free access to high-quality educational materials with a social, interactive approach designed to assess learning.
Open Yale Courses:
Open Yale Courses (OYC) provides lectures and other materials from selected Yale College courses to the public. The courses span the full range of liberal arts disciplines, including humanities, social sciences, and physical and biological sciences. Registration and enrollment is not required and course do not offer credit hours, degrees, or certificates.
Yale on YouTube:
The Yale Courses channel on YouTube provides entry into the core of the University via its classrooms and academic programs. This channel includes complete sets of lectures from the Open Yale Courses initiative. Complementary syllabi, transcripts, and other resources may also be accessed from the Open Yale Courses site.
Yale on iTunesU:
Listen to Yale faculty, visitors, and performers from a variety of on-campus events and lectures.
Early Middle Ages
Major developments in the political, social, and religious history of Western Europe from the accession of Diocletian to the feudal transformation. Topics include the conversion of Europe to Christianity, the fall of the Roman Empire, the rise of Islam and the Arabs, the “Dark Ages,” Charlemagne and the Carolingian renaissance, and the Viking and Hungarian invasions.
The Moral Foundations of Politics
This course explores main answers to the question “when do governments deserve our allegiance?” It starts with a survey of major political theories of the Enlightenment—Utilitarianism, Marxism, and the social contract tradition—through classical formulations, historical context, and contemporary debates relating to politics today. It then turns to the rejection of Enlightenment political thinking. Lastly, it deals with the nature of, and justifications for, democratic politics, and their relations to Enlightenment and Anti-Enlightenment political thinking. Practical implications of these arguments are covered through discussion of a variety of concrete problems.
Global Problems of Population Growth
This survey course introduces students to the important and basic material on human fertility, population growth, the demographic transition and population policy. Topics include: the human and environmental dimensions of population pressure, demographic history, economic and cultural causes of demographic change, environmental carrying capacity and sustainability. Political, religious and ethical issues surrounding fertility are also addressed. The lectures and readings attempt to balance theoretical and demographic scale analyzes with studies of individual humans and communities. The perspective is global with both developed and developing countries included.
Death
There is one thing I can be sure of: I am going to die. But what am I to make of that fact? This course will examine a number of issues that arise once we begin to reflect on our mortality. The possibility that death may not actually be the end is considered. Are we, in some sense, immortal? Would immortality be desirable? Also a clearer notion of what it is to die is examined. What does it mean to say that a person has died? What kind of fact is that? And, finally, different attitudes to death are evaluated. Is death an evil? How? Why? Is suicide morally permissible? Is it rational? How should the knowledge that I am going to die affect the way I live my life?
The Civil War and Reconstruction Era, 1845-1877
This course explores the causes, course, and consequences of the American Civil War, from the 1840s to 1877. The primary goal of the course is to understand the multiple meanings of a transforming event in American history. Those meanings may be defined in many ways: national, sectional, racial, constitutional, individual, social, intellectual, or moral. Four broad themes are closely examined: the crisis of union and disunion in an expanding republic; slavery, race, and emancipation as national problem, personal experience, and social process; the experience of modern, total war for individuals and society; and the political and social challenges of Reconstruction.
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