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.
Moralities of Everyday Life
How is it that we are capable of transcendent kindness—and unspeakable cruelty? How do we make sense of people’s strongly-held opinions about abortion, gay marriage, affirmative action, and torture? How do evolution, culture, and religion conspire to shape our moral natures? These are among the most important—and most exciting—questions around, and they are the focus of this course. We will explore the modern science of moral belief and moral action, drawing upon disciplines such as cognitive science, neuroscience, economics, and philosophy. We will look at research from the lab, from the community, and from the battlefield; we will discuss babies, monkeys, and psychopaths; we will debate claims about moral differences between men and women, liberals and conservatives, Christians and Muslims. This course will cover prejudice and bigotry, sexuality and purity; punishment, revenge, and forgiveness; and much much more.
The American Revolution
The American Revolution entailed some remarkable transformations–converting British colonists into American revolutionaries, and a cluster of colonies into a confederation of states with a common cause – but it was far more complex and enduring then the fighting of a war. As John Adams put it, “The Revolution was in the Minds of the people… before a drop of blood was drawn at Lexington”–and it continued long past America’s victory at Yorktown. This course will examine the Revolution from this broad perspective, tracing the participants’ shifting sense of themselves as British subjects, colonial settlers, revolutionaries, and Americans.
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