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.
Introduction to Psychology
What do your dreams mean? Do men and women differ in the nature and intensity of their sexual desires? Can apes learn sign language? Why can’t we tickle ourselves? This course tries to answer these questions and many others, providing a comprehensive overview of the scientific study of thought and behavior. It explores topics such as perception, communication, learning, memory, decision-making, religion, persuasion, love, lust, hunger, art, fiction, and dreams. We will look at how these aspects of the mind develop in children, how they differ across people, how they are wired-up in the brain, and how they break down due to illness and injury.
Epidemics in Western Society Since 1600
This course consists of an international analysis of the impact of epidemic diseases on western society and culture from the bubonic plague to HIV/AIDS and the recent experience of SARS and swine flu. Leading themes include: infectious disease and its impact on society; the development of public health measures; the role of medical ethics; the genre of plague literature; the social reactions of mass hysteria and violence; the rise of the germ theory of disease; the development of tropical medicine; a comparison of the social, cultural, and historical impact of major infectious diseases; and the issue of emerging and re-emerging diseases.
Introduction to Political Philosophy
This course is intended as an introduction to political philosophy as seen through an examination of some of the major texts and thinkers of the Western political tradition. Three broad themes that are central to understanding political life are focused upon: the polis experience (Plato, Aristotle), the sovereign state (Machiavelli, Hobbes), constitutional government (Locke), and democracy (Rousseau, Tocqueville). The way in which different political philosophies have given expression to various forms of political institutions and our ways of life are examined throughout the course.
Environmental Politics and Law
Can law change human behavior to be less environmentally damaging? Law will be examined through case histories including: environmental effects of national security, pesticides, air pollution, consumer products, plastics, parks and protected area management, land use, urban growth and sprawl, public/private transit, drinking water standards, food safety, and hazardous site restoration. In each case we will review the structure of law and evaluate its strengths and weaknesses.
Astronomy: Frontiers and Controversies
This course focuses on three particularly interesting areas of astronomy that are advancing very rapidly: Extra-Solar Planets, Black Holes, and Dark Energy. Particular attention is paid to current projects that promise to improve our understanding significantly over the next few years. The course explores not just what is known, but what is currently not known, and how astronomers are going about trying to find out.
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