5

QUALITY OVER QUANTITY: OPEN YALE COURSES

Launched in 2007, Open Yale Courses (OYC) is Yale University’s contribution to the open online courseware space. As of this writing, OYC offers 25 introductory-level courses, carefully selected to include some of Yale’s most popular subjects and faculty members.

Professional-quality lecture videos are the cornerstone of OYC’s offerings. Recorded live in the classroom with a videographer following the action, the videos attempt to faithfully capture the Yale student experience for the home user, enabling non-enrolled students to “audit” Yale courses virtually.¹ Reflecting the principle of quality over quantity, OYC provides a small number of courses that seek to embody the university’s reputation for excellence. The OYC team stresses that all its courses are “full” and “complete,” with a consistent presentation of the same curricular elements: video and audio versions of every lecture, searchable transcripts, syllabi, introductory summaries for each lesson, faculty biographies, and reading lists, as well as problem sets and other materials where appropriate.

OYC is a key component of Yale’s broader digital strategy, which treats the university’s web presence as a critical tool for expanding its global reach. Several internal initiatives are now in place to increase access to the university’s collections, courses, and other resources, as a means of sharing Yale’s intellectual assets with the world. The OYC team recognizes its potential to advance the university’s brand among new audiences; due in part to the success of the project, Yale’s leadership now views digital courses as a major area of interest.

Origins and Development of Open Yale Courses

The origins of the OYC initiative date back to the university’s previous experience with AllLearn, discussed in detail in Chapter 2. AllLearn was a collaborative online venture undertaken in partnership with Oxford, Stanford, and briefly Princeton (before the latter’s withdrawal during the initiative’s early months). Yale “developed 24 full-length arts and sciences courses . . . , two writing courses, six Forums, and two mini courses” under the auspices of AllLearn.² That initiative struggled financially from its inception but was not officially terminated until March 2006—at which point its Yale contingent immediately began thinking of a way to somehow continue its efforts in this space. Yale President Richard C. Levin, who had served as the chair of AllLearn’s board, and Diana Kleiner, a Yale art history professor and former faculty liaison to AllLearn, were the principal participants in the discussions leading to what would become the OYC effort. As Kleiner said, “President Levin and I said Yale needed to benefit from this experiment, but we left it very amorphous” and took some time to think through potential next steps.³

Involvement in AllLearn had taught Yale firsthand how costly such a venture could be, and from the beginning officials felt that a different approach to funding the project would be necessary if the university were to make a second attempt at online course dissemination. As Kleiner remembers, “all of us realized that [with AllLearn] we had tried to see if this could be a breakeven operation, and we learned that it wasn’t so easy to do.”⁴ So this time around, Levin and Kleiner decided to seek grant funding for the initiative. As the AllLearn project was winding down in 2005 and early 2006, those involved from Yale had been keeping abreast of broader developments in the online courseware space, particularly the support for OER initiatives from the Hewlett Foundation, where Levin had served on the board of directors since 1998. The open-access ethos championed by Hewlett and embodied by the projects it has funded is evident in the OYC concept: while in AllLearn Yale had been interested in charging an alumni customer base for access to online courses, Kleiner said that in crafting an approach to the new project, “we thought we’d try another experiment and say ‘we just want to share this.’”⁵ The Yale team submitted a proposal for an initial pilot phase of OYC, originally called “The Yale University Open Educational Resources Video Lecture Project,” to the Hewlett Foundation in June 2006. That proposal credits both AllLearn and other Hewlett-sponsored free courseware initiatives like MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) as its inspirations.

From the Hewlett Foundation’s recent track record, it was apparent that funding was available for major universities willing to invest in open digital course dissemination projects—giving Yale reason to believe that the Foundation might be receptive to its proposal. Hewlett made its first grant in the field that would come to be known as Open Educational Resources (OER) in 2001, with a $5.5 million award to MIT OCW. At that time, much of the Foundation’s education program budget was divided into subfields for higher education, elementary and secondary education, and Bay Area regional support. The higher-education area was somewhat diffuse at the time, encompassing eight different grant-making priorities as well as opportunity grants. The MIT OCW grant fell under the “using technology effectively” focus, which supported a wide range of technology-related projects, including digitization and digital archiving initiatives as well as online teaching tools and distance education efforts. In 2002 the education program underwent a major strategic planning process under its new director, Marshall “Mike” Smith, who led it from 2001 to 2008. In that same year, grants totaling $1.9 million and $1 million, respectively, were awarded to Carnegie Mellon’s Open Learning Initiative (OLI) and Rice University’s Connexions project.⁶ By the end of 2003, the education program emerged from the planning process with the “open-content area” as a distinct component of the Foundation’s grant-making agenda.⁷

In the following years, the number of grants in this area continued to grow. Creative Commons, a not-for-profit organization that provides free licenses to make intellectual property more accessible to end users, received $1 million from the Hewlett Foundation in 2003 to support development of the open licenses that Hewlett-funded open content carries, and Utah State University received the first of several grants to develop its own open courseware as well as the EduCommons software used by other grantees.⁸ Grant recipients for open-content projects in 2004 included the Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health and Foothill De Anza Community College. The year 2005 proved to be an important one in the evolution of Hewlett’s interest in this space: the first meeting of the OCW Consortium was held at MIT in 2005, grants for suites of digital open courses were made to Notre Dame and Tufts, and the term “Open Educational Resources” was adopted to describe all the grants in this area that Hewlett was coming to define.⁹ In the fall of 2005, Hewlett held a forum with the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization and the International Institute for Educational Planning to investigate usage and dissemination strategies for OCW materials worldwide. Of the education program’s budget, $9.5 million (27 percent) was devoted to encouraging open courseware and other OER developments in 2005.¹⁰ Any observer of this burgeoning field could see that the Hewlett Foundation was an enthusiastic supporter of open courseware projects developed at leading institutions. Yale Vice President and Secretary Linda Lorimer noted that the Foundation has “been ambitious in recognizing a vision for outstanding materials from universities being disseminated digitally” and that Hewlett’s approach dovetailed well with OYC’s own objectives.¹¹ Kleiner also acknowledged the importance of Hewlett’s position in helping to inform Yale’s own, saying that “because of the Hewlett interest in OER, we’re all influenced by that messianic zeal.”¹²

Yale viewed online courseware as a way to fulfill the knowledge-dissemination portion of its mission while increasing access to the university’s resources. As Lorimer said, “if you look at the basic goals of a research university, almost everyone would say they [are] threefold. It’s the creation of knowledge, the preservation of knowledge, and the . . . dissemination of knowledge.” She added that this project would allow Yale to “take our intellectual treasury, which is manifested in classroom teaching, and have more people benefit from it than those who are tuition-paying students.”¹³ OYC would therefore offer Yale an opportunity to extend its reach beyond its own student population. Kleiner said that the period during which she and others were contemplating a new online venture, in early 2006, “was a time when . . . our acceptance rates were only going down.”¹⁴ If Yale could admit just a small percentage of interested applicants, the internet would allow it to expand digitally in a way that it could not expand physically.

The OYC team believes that the value of its courses derives from the close semblance of the online versions to the live versions reserved for Yale students, claiming that OYC offers the home user an accurate representation of the classroom experience. As Yale’s Director of Marketing Stephanie Schwartz said, OYC delivers a “360-degree student experience” to non-enrolled learners who would never otherwise have access to it.¹⁵ OYC’s second proposal to the Hewlett Foundation states that “we also hope to highlight excellence and innovation in undergraduate teaching at Yale”—indicating that Yale believed it had something unique to contribute to the world.¹⁶ Kleiner said they were motivated in part by a sense that “there’s a lot of hunger out there for good knowledge online, and Yale could provide that.”¹⁷ This value proposition reflects a shift in Yale’s conception of the intended audience for its online offerings: while AllLearn had been originally designed for an alumni audience, OYC was always considered a means of projecting Yale to far-flung audiences it could not previously reach.

The period during which the AllLearn and OYC concepts were incubated and launched was one of great prosperity for Yale University. In the years between President Levin’s 1993 arrival and 2007, Yale’s endowment outperformed that of every other American university and provided an increasing share of the operating budget, leading Yale to invest in a number of areas: maintenance of historic campus buildings that had been deferred for decades was finally carried out, a new campus was acquired to raise the university’s standing in the sciences, and a new wave of investment was put toward improving conditions in the surrounding community of New Haven.¹⁸ This financial security provided the sense of confidence and willingness to take risks required to acknowledge AllLearn’s failure and quickly try again with an even higher-profile effort.

Given the challenges that AllLearn had faced in organizing and managing a cooperative effort among partner institutions, Yale decided this time to go it alone and rely only on trusted insiders to run the OYC initiative. Kleiner seemed a natural choice to lead the new project: not only had she served as Yale’s faculty liaison to AllLearn, she was also former deputy provost for the arts, and this administrative and faculty experience positioned her well to span the two groups. She also had years of personal experience incorporating digital technology into her own courses, and she remains a strong supporter of the instructional role of media in the humanities, as well as other liberal arts disciplines.¹⁹ To create the OYC courses, Kleiner worked with the production team that had been responsible for creating AllLearn courses at Yale: the Center for Media and Instructional Innovation (CMI2), led by Paul Lawrence. Other than Kleiner, who remains a full-time faculty member in Yale’s history of art and classics departments in addition to her role as director of OYC, the project’s full-time staff is “minuscule.”²⁰ As principal investigator, Kleiner consults frequently with Yale Vice President and Secretary Linda Lorimer, who oversees Yale’s portfolio of digital outreach activities and is one of President Levin’s closest advisors.

The first phase of the OYC project was initiated in July 2006 upon receipt of the $755,000 that Yale requested from the Hewlett Foundation for a one-year pilot. Kleiner said that the grant was awarded “with a sense that if we came up with something good we could reapply” for more money to scale up the program in subse quent phases.²¹ The nascent project was officially announced to the public in September 2006, and Kleiner and Lawrence and David Hirsch from the CMI2 created three courses in the project’s first semester and four more in its second. Kleiner began her work without full-time assistance, but by the second semester of the pilot Jeffrey Levick, an instructional technologist, had joined the OYC team to coordinate the daily management of the production process. In April 2007 Yale submitted a second proposal to the Foundation and was awarded $2.25 million to create several dozen more courses over the span of three years. The OYC portal went live to the public in September 2007 and featured the seven courses created during the pilot phase.²²

When the initiative was launched in 2007, some in the online courseware community viewed Yale as a latecomer to open education. But the OYC team feels that their timing allowed them to learn from peers’ examples as well as to develop new strategies for their offerings that differentiate OYC from other efforts.²³ Hirsch said that by initiating this project in 2006, “we learned from what other schools had done and then added a little bit more, always trying to push ourselves to raise the bar.”²⁴

Open Yale Courses’ Content and Organization

An Open Yale Course is a “multidimensional [package] of internet-based course materials,” containing full video and audio recordings of each course, as well as written transcripts of those recordings. The site also contains course syllabi and reading lists, along with assignments or problem sets where appropriate. The initial proposal stated that while MIT had already made its “course architecture” available through OCW materials, Yale would seek to deliver “primary course content” in an openly available format.²⁵ For MIT OCW, the courses are mostly text-based, with written materials at the core of the offering, but Kleiner said that OYC considers those materials as mere supplements to the full video and audio recordings. MIT has been producing video for some of its courses for several years, but OCW external relations manager Steve Carson said that he admires Yale’s contribution to the online courseware space: “They have done a really great job of putting up the material specifically for video.”²⁶

OYC cuts a broad swath across the liberal arts, with courses in fields ranging from philosophy to religious studies to physics (Figure 5.1). Although courses in the hard sciences are present, the corpus is weighted more heavily toward the social sciences and the humanities, reflecting Yale’s relative institutional strengths and perhaps providing unique value in the online courseware space.²⁷ Some of the most popular courses on OYC include “Modern Poetry,” “Introduction to the Old Testament,” and a philosophy course called “Death.” In the fall of 2009 Yale mounted an art history course—on Roman art and architecture, taught by Kleiner herself—which Lawrence called “a first in this space.”²⁸ Art history courses (as well as those in music history, which Yale also explored in 2009 with a course entitled “Listening to Music”) are rarely if ever posted by other producers of online courseware, perhaps due to difficulties associated with securing rights to the images on which the lectures rely.²⁹ For Kleiner, shown delivering an OYC lecture in Figure 5.2, the breadth of its course offerings is one of OYC’s key merits, because “in an increasingly specialized world, it’s important to underscore the liberal arts and the importance of critical thinking.”³⁰

FIGURE 5.1 Open Yale Courses landing page, featuring ITAL 310, “Dante in Translation,” with Giuseppe Mazzotta, Sterling Professor of Humanities for Italian (as it appeared on May 11, 2010).

Available at http://oyc.yale.edu/. Permission provided courtesy of Yale University. © 2010 Yale University. License: Creative Commons BY-NC-SA.

FIGURE 5.2 Still from Open Yale Courses lecture video, HSAR 252, “Roman Architecture,” session 4, with Diana E. E. Kleiner, Dunham Professor of History of Art and Classics (as taught in spring 2009).

Available at http://openmedia.yale.edu/projects/media_viewer/video_viewer2.php?window_size=medium&type=flv&title=HSAR%20252%20-%20Lecture%204%20-%20Prof.%20Diana%20E.%20 E.%20Kleiner&path=%2Fcourses%2Fspring09%2Fhsar252%2Fflash%2Fhsar252_04_012209. Permission provided courtesy of Yale University. © 2010 Yale University. License: Creative Commons BY-NC-SA.

Though OYC has produced only a small number of courses to date, those involved emphasize that the project has chosen to focus on quality over quantity. Twenty-five OYC courses had been posted as of the summer of 2010, and “by the end of the initial grant period, three dozen courses will be available.”³¹ Lorimer described OYC’s approach as follows: “We’re proud of the undergraduate experience we offer to baccalaureate students here, so we said we would like to have available for free something as close to the entire experience as you could have. And that of course is a distinctive proposition, different from at least the beginning of MIT courseware, where they had fabulous ambitions to have components of a huge number of courses, but not necessarily the entire complement of what constituted a course.”³² Both the OYC and OCW teams stress the “completeness” of their respective projects, but with very different ideas of what “complete” means: OCW is comprehensive because it includes something from every class taught at the university, but OYC has instead focused its resources on achieving what Kleiner calls “a full revealing” of fewer courses.³³ As Yale spokesman Tom Conroy put it, “These are gavel-to-gavel presentations. We’ve put everything online that we could, and I think that’s what makes this different.”³⁴

OYC courses are all introductory, originally intended for first-and second-year Yale students, and they include “some of the University’s most popular undergraduate courses” taught by highly regarded scholars.³⁵ As the project director, Kleiner is primarily responsible for securing faculty participation, though she receives input from Yale’s provost and dean of undergraduate education, as well as other administrators and faculty. Lorimer said that a real mark of the project’s success is the fact that “some of our most distinguished faculty in the arts and sciences, those who are giants as scholars and who are commanding classroom teachers, have been participants in the Open Yale Courses.”³⁶ In determining which faculty to approach, Kleiner leans toward those with strong reputations both on and off campus. “I keep my eyes open for people in the news,” said Kleiner, who is interested in tapping Yale faculty who have demonstrated appeal beyond academia or their own specialized disciplines. But she cautioned that “a famous person who’s a dullard in the classroom” would not be chosen, and said that wherever possible she wants to achieve “a mix of younger faculty and older faculty, men and women—you’re looking for diversity if you can find it.”³⁷

OYC emphasizes quality in the amount of materials produced for each class, as well as in the caliber of the faculty and the popularity of the course. But another key source of quality lies in the materials’ production values. The OYC team attempts to create a finished product that conveys the Yale classroom experience to the home user as accurately as possible. To that end, OYC videos do not rely on automatic capture; instead, videographers are sent into the classroom to film the professor in the act of teaching, enhancing the naturalistic feel of the recordings. The resulting videos depict both the instructor and the visuals—slides, writing on the chalkboard—that he or she relies on to teach, allowing the viewer to see the relevant classroom material.³⁸

Kleiner said that fundamentally, “we wanted everyone to be able to see and hear each lecture as if they were sitting in the classroom.”³⁹ If press coverage of OYC is any indication, the team has achieved that goal. An article in The Guardian comments that “there are no concessions made for the camera, nor are corners cut,” resulting in a viewer experience that is “as authentic as possible.”⁴⁰ Describing Langdon Hammer’s modern poetry course, technology writer Virginia Heffernan writes that “professors wear clip-on microphones but otherwise seem to conduct the classes just for the students. . . . Hammer can be seen distributing handouts and encouraging students to do their homework; he’s not playing to the online bleacher seats or would-be book buyers. This is the real New Haven stuff.”⁴¹

To help approximate the in-person experience via the web, OYC attempts to create TV-quality broadcasts. “The lectures have been captured using Sony’s XDCAM HD (High-Definition) format, to ensure the highest quality of content production and delivery” to provide a polished finished product for the user.⁴² This, too, seems to be working, at least for Heffernan. In a piece for the New York Times Magazine in which she selects and describes her five favorite online courses, she writes “it’s hard not to be biased in favor of the Open Yale courses . . . simply because they are presented in such a frank, nonfussy way. The silky audiovisuals start without graphic rigmarole and don’t stall till they’re over.”⁴³

In addition, the presentation of all OYC materials is kept consistent and intended to be user-friendly. Hirsch said that “we really want to make it easy for the user to find and use the content,” leading to a high degree of standardization in the types and arrangement of materials from one Open Yale Course to the next.⁴⁴ According to Yale strategist David Schiffman, in contrast to other online resources that can appear a bit scattered, OYC “is a very high-quality, produced project with a consistent set of assets for every single course.”⁴⁵ For instance, each element is fitted to a strict template, which Kleiner said was designed in part to achieve a clean look—a nontrivial consideration for a site that aims for intuitive navigation and visual appeal to achieve a seamless user experience.⁴⁶ Lawrence said that at the beginning of the design process, the team from the CMI2 drew on inspiration from the courses it had previously developed for AllLearn as well as materials from successful commercial outlets like the University of Phoenix.⁴⁷

When the taping is completed, the production team engages in meticulous editing and polishing of the courses in postproduction before they are put online, a process which Lawrence considers unique. Full-text transcripts are created for each course to accompany the video and audio versions; Lawrence said that while Yale outsources the transcription process, “when they come back they’re still scrubbed to check for accuracy” to ensure that no misspellings or mistakes make their way into the text version of the lectures. Lawrence emphasized that the philosophy of focusing on quality over quantity has guided the entire OYC production process: “I think we’re using the best of technology, and the best of human intervention, and it’s connecting up well. Now does that scale to a thousand courses? No, it doesn’t, but I don’t think that’s what this project is about.”⁴⁸

While a great deal of effort and labor goes into the creation and delivery of each Open Yale Course, Lawrence stressed the importance of keeping the burden on Yale professors and students as light as possible. “We thought that the best thing we could do for Diana, who had to recruit these faculty, was to develop a process that didn’t bump into [them],” he said. “That was something that we thought at times AllLearn might have done—not intentionally, but just by their production process they might have caused faculty to have to work harder than they should have. So we wanted at the very beginning to develop that production process that would streamline . . . the process for faculty.” By bringing a live camera crew in to tape professors at the time and place they would normally teach, Lawrence hopes to minimize the impact OYC has on the faculty’s workflow.⁴⁹

The process of allowing faculty to view and approve their recorded lecture content before it is published is also designed for their comfort: the CMI2 makes the raw footage available within days through a closed learning management system, so faculty can view it at their leisure without needing to come into the studio. Lawrence and his team also try to be conscious of not disrupting the Yale students who are in the classrooms during the tapings: “We did not want to interfere with that teaching that’s going on in that classroom, because these are Yale undergrads that worked extraordinarily hard to get where they are, and we did not want to interfere with their learning by placing a camera in their faces—we try to be as unobtrusive as possible.”⁵⁰

Kleiner said that overall the faculty recruiting effort has been well received: “In the pilot phase of the project, we achieved a high level of success in persuading members of the faculty to participate . . . of a total of ten faculty members approached to take part, seven accepted, and, of the three who did not, one member expressed interest in doing so in the future.”⁵¹ Yale faculty receive a small honorarium upon completion of an Open Yale Course in exchange for participating. Kleiner said that she “feel[s] strongly that there should be some incentive,” though the compensation is “not significant enough for anyone to do it for the money.”⁵²

Impact of Open Yale Courses

OYC is considered key to several of Yale’s strategic ambitions, including its desire to increase its global reach and expand its online presence. Global engagement has been a priority for Yale for the past decade, and a desire to increase its presence on the world stage has influenced nearly all of the university’s activities. The Yale Corporation devoted its 1997 annual meeting to discussing the institution’s global position, inaugurating a period of increased activity around international efforts. A Wall Street Journal piece on President Levin’s tenure cites international issues as among the most significant in his portfolio. After assuming Yale’s presidency in 1993, Levin first focused on improving the university’s facilities, but “the second step was to go global, injecting international issues into every facet of the university, raising its profile abroad, forging joint ventures, expanding longstanding ties to China, pushing undergraduates to study overseas, recruiting foreign students and faculty. ‘If we want to be a truly great university, we have to embrace the world,’ he says.”⁵³ A three-year strategic plan was implemented in 2005 to “internationalize” Yale through a series of strategic efforts at nearly all institutional levels. One of the main goals outlined in that document was to “position Yale as a global university of consequence” by “working to increase Yale’s visibility around the world.”⁵⁴ Although OYC is not explicitly named, many involved with the project cite it as a part of the university’s efforts in this area.

The potential of a digital courseware project to help further Yale’s internationalizing ambitions was clear from the beginning: Kleiner said that when she and Levin were considering the possibility of a new project following AllLearn, “we knew we wanted to stay in this arena, and it fit well with where Yale was at the time: our ambitions were global.”⁵⁵ OYC’s initial grant proposal states even more explicitly that “this undertaking aligns well with Yale’s long-term aim to increase its engagement in the international community through student and faculty recruitment, educational outreach, research collaborations, and public service initiatives.” The OYC team designed the offering with an international viewership in mind, selecting introductory undergraduate courses in order to “best serve the purpose of introducing lecture content to the open learning resource model, given the potential value of such courses to a broad range of users worldwide.”⁵⁶ The CMI2 also attempted to use multiple technologies aimed at viewers with differing degrees of connectivity, language backgrounds, and abilities.⁵⁷

OYC also functions to further the university’s branding in the online environment. Interviewees defined the Yale brand as commensurate with excellence and considered it crucial that every facet of OYC enforce that aspect of the overall brand.⁵⁸ Stephanie Schwartz, who is Yale’s director of both marketing and trademark licensing and oversees OYC’s promotional efforts, said that the decision to make quality paramount for OYC “was driven from a marketing perspective, because every time someone views something we made, they’re consuming Yale, and the quality of their experience reflects how they think of us and the brand.” While that excellence had previously been reserved only for the privileged few in New Haven, OYC allows Yale to project itself outward via one of its core activities—classroom teaching. Schwartz believes that “99.9 percent of the planet will experience Yale through the internet,” and that online projects like OYC can therefore introduce Yale to new audiences that might not know about the university through other channels. “Depending on the market, Open Yale Courses reinforces people’s perceptions of Yale or creates them, efficiently and cost-effectively,” she said. “In places where we’re already well established, this reinforces the ideas we hope they have of Yale. In places where people have never heard of Yale, viewing a course is their first interaction with Yale . . . and they’ll have a positive experience, and I’ve just earned a customer.” Given Yale’s desire to reach far-flung audiences, Schwartz feels that “the digital impact—the impact we will have remotely on people—will play an increasing role in the development and enhancement of our reputation.”⁵⁹

Visual elements of Yale’s branding—the university’s name, logo, and signature colors—are prominently displayed on all content intended for digital dissemination. Every YouTube video associated with OYC has a Yale watermark to ensure that the materials convey their provenance and will receive proper attribution. Attention to consistent branding is conveyed in other design elements. The CMI2 did the graphic design for OYC, and Lawrence said that they wanted it to relate to Yale’s main website, sending a strong visual message about the content’s origins. “When people think of Yale, they think of blue, and this needed to have a close connection to our institutional branding. For an external audience, we wanted to stick with what makes Yale Yale, and blue is such an iconic color.” Lawrence added that in designing the site, they were also concerned with “keeping it clean,” using streamlined fonts and a uniform look and feel for each course. Mistakes or sloppiness could not be tolerated because “we were carrying Yale’s name with this, and we wanted to make sure it was something that connected well with the brand of the university.”⁶⁰

The press has been quite responsive to OYC. Articles in major media outlets have consistently described it as a major achievement. An item on ABC News Online stated that “While Yale is not the first to post classes online, it is providing special access by artfully videotaping lectures,” and a February 2009 article in The Guardian claimed that “the most notable new step in democratizing higher education was recently taken by Yale University who initiated the Open Yale Courses in 2006—the first institution of its caliber to offer comprehensive online education for the general public.”⁶¹ Inside Higher Ed introduced its coverage of OYC by saying that “a handful of colleges intentionally make course materials available to anyone with an Internet connection, and now a major name may redefine expectations for online learning.”⁶² Despite trailing MIT OCW by five years, OYC has struck observers as a unique and valuable contribution to the online courseware space.

The experience of working on the OYC project has also pushed Yale to explore other digital dissemination efforts, which have become an institution-wide strategic priority. Kleiner recalled that within Yale, “it sparked thinking on the digital enterprise in general—I think this project served as a foundation and also a spur to the university on thinking about working on digital activities more broadly.”⁶³ Lorimer agreed, saying that in the wake of the OYC project, “We’ve thought much more boldly about what Yale could be contributing to the world in terms of our intellectual assets.” To develop ways that Yale might “disseminate more expansively its intellectual treasury,” the university is working on a digital strategy to coordinate all of its previously disparate online efforts.⁶⁴ In addition to the OYC effort, Yale has recently created an Office of Digital Dissemination (ODD) tasked with aggregating and creating digital content aimed at an external audience, establishing a public face for Yale on the internet.⁶⁵ ODD Director Lucas Swineford said that in addition to marketing efforts on behalf of OYC, the ODD works to coordinate dissemination strategies for content from around Yale, providing some synergy to all the digital efforts that go on in various schools or departments.⁶⁶ As Lawrence observed, “this is an exciting time to be at Yale in terms of developing materials to be seen by an external audience.”⁶⁷ These efforts are centrally driven and will soon be governed under an overall institutional strategic plan for digital activities.

As for Yale students, they of course have access to the lectures along with the general public, “and many watch the videos as a way of shopping classes.”⁶⁸ Prospective students have spoken to Dean of Admissions Jeffrey Brenzel about OYC, which is linked on Yale’s main admissions webpage: “We’ve had a fair number of high school students who have dipped into them and told us about it. . . . I can’t quantify what the impact has been, but I think it’s been positive.” Brenzel characterized OYC as “a nice enhancement to the primary recruiting tools” that Yale uses to attract and inform prospective students.⁶⁹

In assessing its external impact, OYC—like many online courseware programs—is heavily reliant on anecdotal feedback from individual users. Lorimer admitted that when it comes to OYC’s overall impact, “we don’t yet have a scientific way to evaluate it. We have these testimonials, so certainly on both individuals and on some institutions, it’s already had what seems to be . . . a serious educational impact.”⁷⁰ Site usage statistics show that users reside all over the world, and this has indicated to the OYC team that Yale is contributing to global education. In Kleiner’s words, “The testimonies are so positive that it’s clear they’re really changing people’s lives.”⁷¹

The OYC team had no specific usage goal when the site launched, aiming simply to reach as many users as possible. The first proposal stated that “at this time, we do not anticipate setting targets for participation for the project’s pilot phase.” According to Kleiner, they had seen the usage numbers for MIT OCW, which are available on its website: “We didn’t think we’d be likely to get numbers that large because they were going with all of their courses, but that gave us a ballpark estimate of what might be possible.” But she stressed that “this isn’t a numbers game, since we’re not making money off this; this is a gift we’re giving to the world, so we want to see if we can bring that to as many people as possible.” That said, the OYC team is happy with the level of usage the materials have received thus far. “We’re being accessed by nearly every country in the world, over 190—the reach is really very, very broad,” Kleiner said.⁷²

The usage data come from analytics compiled by the OYC technologists, as well as pop-up surveys that have been placed on the site from time to time asking visitors to self-identify. OYC’s project manager Jeffrey Levick reported in early 2009 that “since its launch in December 2007, approximately 850,000 unique visitors from over 190 countries around the world have accessed Open Yale Courses,” and the university’s press office has stated that “Open Yale Courses is one of the most frequently visited Yale websites.”⁷³

A key effort to ensure the external impact of OYC courses has been through usage partnerships with institutions around the world. Although the courses are freely available and licensed under Creative Commons, Yale has also felt additional responsibility to encourage usage from specific sources. In a 2008 speech, Levin pointed out that “a novel feature of the Yale offerings is that we are not simply posting these courses and waiting to see who uses them. We have established partnerships with universities around the world, who are using all or part of our courses in their own undergraduate programs.”⁷⁴ According to Lorimer, Yale’s interest in targeting specific user institutions around the world has developed over time: “For the Open Yale Courses, at the beginning, we were not looking at audiences per se, we were looking at having it up there and letting anyone take advantage of it. . . . We’re still doing that. We’ve realized now [that] if we’re really going to have it be an extension of our underlying mission, we should be more intentional and more focused to supplement its ubiquitous availability by looking at partners who would actually use it for serious educational purposes.”⁷⁵ Yale is interested in ensuring, through direct partnerships with ten universities around the world, that these other institutions will utilize the materials as a formal, structured part of their own curricula.

Yale’s Office of International Affairs arranged many of these partnerships with foreign institutions with which it had established relationships, including the University of Bahrain, the University of Ghana, and Peking University. Lorimer also said that at Yale, “we have all kinds of international partnerships—student exchanges, faculty research projects, joint laboratories abroad—so this is another dimension of Yale’s internationalization effort.”⁷⁶ So far, arranging these partnerships has been the main effort to market OYC.⁷⁷ According to Kleiner, “when you go to all the trouble of creating these, when you go to the Hewlett Foundation to get support from them, you want these materials to be used. The whole purpose is to make these as well known as possible to those who would find them most useful and who might not come across them on their own.”⁷⁸

It may seem contradictory to expend resources to increase usage of open and free materials, but when asked why Yale felt the need to take the extra step of creating these usage partnerships, Lorimer replied: “For impact. The issue is for impact. Yes, it would be great if [a user] in his free time . . . could find that many hours to study a physics course or a Greek history course for his general enlightenment. But if we’re talking about liberal education courses, that requires a discipline that is very different from having a one-hour lecture netcast. They are intellectually demanding.” Just as the OLI team feels certain that a “hybrid mode” combining online courseware with face-to-face instruction is the best environment for student learning, Yale feels that its offerings can have the greatest impact when they are incorporated into a student’s own coursework. Lorimer said that Yale realized that “over time you might do much, much more if you look at these resources and find ways for other partners to take advantage of them. Again, freely and openly, but to be disciplined to ensure that they are actually being used.”⁷⁹

Although OYC aims to replicate the Yale student experience for a wider public, the university is not interested in offering credits for completing these courses, arguing that the online versions are not equivalent to a Yale student’s educational experience. When the AllLearn venture was under-enrolled, ultimately fruitless discussions of offering university credits for online courses began, and Kleiner remarked that the conversation on the potential of creden-tialed online education has been ongoing for years. “But Yale is not seriously considering giving Yale credit for these courses. While we’re willing to share what we do with the larger world, giving Yale credit for that and making it equivalent to what our students get is a slippery slope. . . . We may be giving away the classroom experience our undergraduates have, but what we’re putting out is not a Yale education.” Kleiner added that the OYC and enrolled experiences “are not equal, so giving credit for this doesn’t make sense—if an institution like Yale is going to expect people to pay X number of dollars for a degree,” the university could not make an equivalent experience available online and expect students to still be willing to pay a premium for the traditional version.⁸⁰

However, Lorimer stressed that other institutions are welcome to incorporate the courses into their official curricula as a pathway to credit. She said that the credit Yale offers its own students is earned not just by attending lectures, but through examinations, term papers, and substantial engagement with faculty—none of which are possible through the current OYC model. But “partnerships mean that the other institutions can build Yale-standard education into their own provision,” which Lorimer says is an important aspect of what Yale is trying to do. “I think the idea for where we are now is yes, you should get credit, but that doesn’t have to be through Yale.”⁸¹ She noted that by partnering with the other institutions, Yale can feel confident that someone somewhere might be receiving credit for knowledge gained through OYC.

Open Yale Courses and Sustainability

OYC’s costs are largely covered by the Hewlett Foundation grant, and there is some uncertainty as to the future of the project following the expiration of those funds in 2010. The first OYC proposal in June 2006 requested $755,000 for a year-long pilot phase to create seven courses. The second proposal, submitted April 5, 2007, resulted in an award of $2.25 million over three years to capture several dozen additional courses, and two more staff members were allotted to the project. Lorimer said in 2009 that OYC’s future is secure for the duration of the Hewlett grant, and “after that, we don’t have plans exactly.”⁸²

Though the project’s future finances are not entirely settled, there is reason to believe that Yale may be willing to assume the financial responsibility of supporting OYC internally.⁸³ The administration considers OYC a high priority, and the project enjoys the full support of the university president and consistent involvement from the secretary’s office. Among the three most compelling reasons for the grant listed in the first proposal to Hewlett is “institutional commitment: University President Richard Levin, the other University Officers, and Yale College Dean Peter Salovey strongly support the proposed initiative and the underlying educational and social principles that it seeks to advance, which are consistent with the University’s broad educational mission.”⁸⁴ Kleiner characterized OYC as a “very high” priority for President Levin, who helped formulate the OYC concept along with her and was also the chair of the AllLearn board.⁸⁵

Furthermore, several of the project’s founding documents suggest that Yale representatives foresaw the need to become more financially committed to the project as time went on. The first grant proposal states that “if the project becomes sufficiently integral to Yale’s overall teaching enterprise (for Yale undergraduates, graduate students, faculty, alumni), Yale may subsume some costs in its general operating budget.”⁸⁶ The university further positioned itself as the project’s potential long-term source of funding in the second grant proposal, explicitly stating that, “as the Project makes substantial progress towards completing its initial goals, the University will consider subsuming a portion of the Project’s ongoing costs into its operating budget,” as MIT has already done by supplying half of OCW’s operating funds out of the provost-controlled Institute budget.⁸⁷

OYC’s project staff has indicated that its long-term vision involves not just sustaining the existing content but also expanding it in various ways. More broadly, the idea of digitally distributing the university’s “assets” has become entrenched within Yale, and the university’s pursuit of similar projects to OYC is slated to increase in the coming years. According to Lorimer, Yale leaders are strongly considering expanding online course offerings to include content from all of its professional schools in addition to the undergraduate content developed for OYC. “I do believe that within three to five years, we will find from other grant sources funds that will allow us to supplement the arts and sciences courses currently on Open Yale Courses with professional school courses—and that’s not only sustainability, that’s going to be expansion.” Lorimer can imagine exciting possibilities for open courses in fields like public health and medicine and said that in the future, “I would hope that Open Yale Courses would have spawned a generation of new ways to disseminate Yale’s teaching, both in the professional schools as well as the College.”⁸⁸

Interviewees were also careful to state that while some version of the Hewlett-funded OYC courses must always be offered free of charge, Yale is not against eventually creating revenue streams to support other digital dissemination activities that the university may pursue. Lorimer stated that “we don’t have an objection to contemplating that there will be some uses of these online teaching materials that will have a fee.” She added that “Open Yale Courses, four years from now, might be a whole lot more than what Hewlett has funded here. It could become an umbrella brand for . . . [content from] the law school. We don’t have plans now, but it’s possible.” And should the offering expand at Yale’s expense, the university is open to charging fees to recoup its costs. As Lorimer put it, “just like we have students that we charge tuition to, and students that we give full financial aid to, we think there are some courses—not the ones we developed in this round—where you can imagine it would be quite appropriate to have some charges.” While Yale has not yet monetized any of its online curricular offerings, Lorimer said that “in this regard I think we might be different from some of the others, in that we’re open to at least musing about . . . ways in which to monetize some of our dissemination initiatives to provide funding to do more of them.”⁸⁹

Since awarding OYC’s major three-year grant in 2007, the Hewlett Foundation has diversified its approach to OER by focusing on areas like open textbooks and online educational games as well as courseware, in addition to investing further in subject areas like public health and activities like assessment of outcomes. Although “early in the development of OER, Hewlett used name branding and elite universities to signal the quality of content,”⁹⁰ the Foundation has ceased funding individual institutions to produce their own suites of online courseware, and Yale may be one of the last such projects.

OYC’s grant proposals indicate that the team has always understood the high likelihood that, after leveraging Hewlett funding to experiment with online courseware in a relatively risk-free manner, Yale would need to take over responsibility for financing the project at the termination of this grant. The acknowledged role that the university might play in ongoing funding may have contributed to the project’s design from the outset: OYC serves external constituencies but is also deeply integrated into several of Yale’s institutional objectives, particularly that of increasing Yale’s exposure around the world. In President Levin’s words, “we are pleased that so many people from around the globe have explored Open Yale Courses. . . . making part of the Yale classroom experience accessible beyond the campus through the available technology is a significant emphasis of our growing digital presence.”⁹¹ It is therefore not surprising that Yale would begin to think of OYC as a pilot project for an expanded corpus of online course materials, utilizing the OYC concept as a vehicle for the university’s broader future ambitions.

 

¹ Yale Center for Media and Instructional Innovation, “Open Access to the Yale Classroom Experience,” http://cmi2.yale.edu/projects.php?action=view_project&project=oyc&category=platform.

² “Proposal to the Hewlett Foundation Education Program,” Yale University, Diana E. E. Kleiner, principal investigator, June 2006, 3.

³ Interview with Diana Kleiner, 1/22/09.

⁴ Ibid.

⁵ Ibid.

⁶ Conceived in 1999, Connexions is a platform that enables users to view, author, or edit open content. Connexions utilizes an XML (Extensible Markup Language) format and modular organization to allow users to organize content as they see fit, creating unique “connections” across material to customize online courses that may also serve as digital open textbooks (“About Connexions: Philosophy,” http://cnx.org/aboutus/index_html).

⁷ Hewlett Foundation Annual Report—2003, http://www.hewlett.org/news/2003-annual-report, 14. In outlining the education department’s areas of focus, new language emerged in this report regarding grants in technology. One of the department’s five strategic components was now “using information technology to increase access to high-quality academic content” (ibid., 12).

⁸ According to the Creative Commons website, “Creative Commons licenses are not an alternative to copyright. They work alongside copyright, so you can modify your copyright terms to best suit your needs” (“About: What Is CC?” Creative Commons, http://creativecommons.org/about/what-is-cc).

⁹ Hewlett Foundation Annual Report—2005, http://www.hewlett.org/news/2005-annual-report, 3.

¹⁰ William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, “2005 Budget Memorandum: Education Program,” 11.

¹¹ Interview with Linda Lorimer, 3/6/09.

¹² Interview with Diana Kleiner, 1/22/09.

¹³ Interview with Linda Lorimer, 3/6/09.

¹⁴ Interview with Diana Kleiner, 1/22/09.

¹⁵ Interview with Stephanie Schwartz, 12/17/08.

¹⁶ “Proposal to the Hewlett Foundation Education Program,” Yale University, Diana E. E. Kleiner, principal investigator, April 5, 2007, 11.

¹⁷ Interview with Diana Kleiner, 1/22/09.

¹⁸ See Van der Werf, Martin, “Yale’s Ambitious Renovation Tops Any Undertaken by a University,” Chronicle of Higher Education, online edition, October 20, 2000; Fabrikant, Geraldine, “For Yale’s Money Man, a Higher Calling,” New York Times, online edition, February 18, 2007; Arenson, Karen W., “At Yale, a New Campus Just for Research,” New York Times, online edition, July 4, 2007; Gootman, Elissa, “An Intricate Bond: New Haven’s Past and Future Are So Tied to Yale, But It Took 300 Years for the Two to Get Along,” New York Times, online edition, February 18, 2001; and Paul, Noel C., “Beset by New Haven’s Ills, Yale Revitalizes City,” Christian Science Monitor, online edition, September 14, 2004.

¹⁹ “Proposal to the Hewlett Foundation Education Program,” June 2006, 7.

²⁰ Interview with Diana Kleiner, 2/25/09. One full-time technologist was hired to work under Kleiner during the pilot phase, and two additional employees have joined the OYC team since.

²¹ Interview with Diana Kleiner, 1/22/09.

²² “Proposal to the Hewlett Foundation Education Program,” 9, 4.

²³ Interview with Paul Lawrence, 12/17/08.

²⁴ Interview with David Hirsch, 12/17/08.

²⁵ “Proposal to the Hewlett Foundation Education Program,” 2, 5 (emphasis added).

²⁶ Quoted in O’Leary, Mary, “Popular Yale Courses on ’Net.” New Haven Register, online edition, December 23, 2007. OYC’s second grant proposal acknowledges that MIT is also providing some video for courses, but “MIT states that video is supplemental and not essential to the Institute’s mission” (“Proposal to the Hewlett Foundation Education Program,” April 5, 2007, 2).

²⁷ OYC’s 2007 grant proposal asserts that “lecture videos made available to date [from other sources] have been drawn primarily from science and technology courses, leaving much of the breadth of liberal arts out of the picture” (ibid., 5).

²⁸ Interview with Paul Lawrence, 12/17/08.

²⁹ Courses in music are also heavily reliant on copyrighted intellectual property in the form of audio recordings, which can be problematic to post on the internet.

³⁰ Interview with Diana Kleiner, 1/22/09.

³¹ Yale Center for Media and Instructional Innovation, “Open Access to the Yale Classroom Experience.”

³² Interview with Linda Lorimer, 3/6/09.

³³ Interview with Diana Kleiner, 1/22/09.

³⁴ Quoted in Fischman, Josh, “Yale U. Puts Complete Courses Online,” Wired Campus blog (Chronicle of Higher Education), December 11, 2007, http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Yale-U-Puts-Complete-Courses/3550.

³⁵ “Now Anyone Can ‘Audit’ Popular Yale Courses via Internet,” Yale Bulletin & Calendar, online edition, 36, no. 13 (December 14, 2007).

³⁶ Interview with Linda Lorimer, 3/6/09. The first grant proposal promised that “Professor Kleiner will recruit faculty from among the most experienced and popular teachers at the undergraduate level” to create a suite of courses that “represent some of Yale’s best teaching” (“Proposal to the Hewlett Foundation Education Program,” April 5, 2007, 2, 12).

³⁷ Interview with Diana Kleiner, 1/22/09.

³⁸ Lawrence explained that OYC courses are filmed with “a camera that is motivated; it actually follows the faculty member. It’s a camera that reacts when a faculty member points or moves around the classroom” (interview with Paul Lawrence, 12/17/08).

³⁹ “Now Anyone Can ‘Audit’ Popular Yale Courses via Internet.”

⁴⁰ Balakrishnan, Angela, “Reading Poetry at Yale . . . in My Sitting Room,” The Guardian, online edition, April 29, 2008.

⁴¹ Heffernan, Virginia, “The Camera-Friendly, Perfectly Pixelated, Easily Downloadable Celebrity Academic,” New York Times Magazine, online edition, September 21, 2008.

⁴² Yale Center for Media and Instructional Innovation, “Open Access to the Yale Classroom Experience.”

⁴³ Heffernan, “The Camera-Friendly . . . Celebrity Academic.” Of the five courses Hef-fernan highlights, two are from OYC.

⁴⁴ Interview with David Hirsch, 12/17/08.

⁴⁵ Interview with David Schiffman, 12/18/08.

⁴⁶ Interview with Diana Kleiner, 1/22/09.

⁴⁷ Interview with Paul Lawrence, 12/17/08.

⁴⁸ Ibid.

⁴⁹ Ibid. “We want faculty to feel that they’re part of the project, but also to feel that it doesn’t burden them on a daily basis.”

⁵⁰ Ibid.

⁵¹ “Proposal to the Hewlett Foundation Education Program,” April 5, 2007, 8.

⁵² Interview with Diana Kleiner, 1/22/09.

⁵³ Wessel, David, “Yale Safeguards Its Top Spot,” Wall Street Journal, online edition, April 24, 2008.

⁵⁴ Levin, Richard C., and Linda Koch Lorimer, “The Internationalization of Yale: 20052008,” December 2005, http://world.yale.edu/about/pdf/Internationalization_Yale.pdf.

⁵⁵ Interview with Diana Kleiner, 1/22/09.

⁵⁶ “Proposal to the Hewlett Foundation Education Program,” June 2006, 3, 5.

⁵⁷ “Lectures are available in audio-only format and in multiple video formats to accommodate low-bandwidth users. A full transcript of every lecture is provided as a resource for learners who do not have adequate connectivity to view the videos or for those who prefer to read the lecture content. Closed captioning is available on the videos to further enhance content accessibility” (Yale Center for Media and Instructional Innovation, “Open Access to the Yale Classroom Experience”).

⁵⁸ Interviews with Lucas Swineford, 1/22/09, and Stephanie Schwartz, 12/17/08.

⁵⁹ Interview with Stephanie Schwartz, 12/17/08.

⁶⁰ Interview with Paul Lawrence, 12/17/08.

⁶¹ Quoted in Urley, Sarah, “Ivy League Curtain Opened: Yale University Allows Free Access to Select Undergraduate Courses,” ABC News Online, http://abcnews.go.com/Business/story?id=3997573&page=1; Minden, Sonia, “Higher Ed Goes Broadband,” The Guardian, online edition, February 2, 2009.

⁶² Guess, Andy, “Open Courses Open Wider,” Inside Higher Ed, December 12, 2007.

⁶³ Interview with Diana Kleiner, 2/25/09.

⁶⁴ Interview with Linda Lorimer, 3/6/09.

⁶⁵ These efforts are centering on a platform for all of the university’s freely available digital content called Open Yale. This platform will host a collection of preexisting materials culled from different sources and programs throughout the university. Lucas Swineford said that the goal of this portal “is to make all of these assets more discoverable” (quoted in Needham, Paul, “Digitization: Just a Click Away,” Yale Daily News, online edition, October 30, 2008). The ODD is run out of the Office of the Secretary, which is responsible “for the public face of the university, and the way we look at digital dissemination is that it’s about the public face of the university—we think of this really as a publishing vehicle” (interview with Lucas Swineford, 1/22/09).

⁶⁶ Ibid.

⁶⁷ Interview with Paul Lawrence, 12/17/08.

⁶⁸ Needham, Paul, “Cyber Yale: You and Me and Everyone We Know,” Yale Daily News, online edition, February 20, 2009.

⁶⁹ Interview with Jeffrey Brenzel, 4/23/09.

⁷⁰ Interview with Linda Lorimer, 3/6/09.

⁷¹ Interview with Diana Kleiner, 2/25/09.

⁷² Ibid. Regarding the initial proposal, see “Proposal to the Hewlett Foundation Education Program,” June 2006, 12. Kleiner said that “We don’t set a specific goal . . . our attitude is ‘let’s just keep moving forward and see how many we can reach’ ” (interview with Diana Kleiner, 2/25/09).

⁷³ Email correspondence with Jeffrey Levick, 1/15/09; “Yale University: Yale Doubles Number of Free Online Courses,” press release, M2 PressWIRE, October 17, 2008. Unlike MIT OCW, OYC does not prominently feature its usage statistics on its website for public viewing.

⁷⁴ Levin, Richard C., “The Internationalization of the University,” speech delivered May 6, 2008, Athens, Greece, http://opa.yale.edu/president/message.aspx?id=7.

⁷⁵ Interview with Linda Lorimer, 3/6/09.

⁷⁶ Ibid.

⁷⁷ Schwartz said, “We want to gain traction with these faculty who can make use of the stuff—that’s been the crux of our effort in the first go-round” (interview with Stephanie Schwartz, 12/17/08).

⁷⁸ Interview with Diana Kleiner, 2/25/09.

⁷⁹ Interview with Linda Lorimer, 3/6/09.

⁸⁰ Interview with Diana Kleiner, 1/22/09.

⁸¹ Balakrishnan, “Reading Poetry at Yale”; interview with Linda Lorimer, 3/6/09.

⁸² Interview with Linda Lorimer, 3/6/09.

⁸³ For instance, Lorimer said that Yale has recently funded a “brand new studio for the CMI2; we have a brand new office called the Office of Digital Assets and Infrastructure that has a healthy budget and a growing staff, so that we’ll have all the infrastructure we need to support an expanded set of programmatic activities” (ibid.).

⁸⁴ “Proposal to the Hewlett Foundation Education Program,” June 2006, 13.

⁸⁵ Interview with Diana Kleiner, 1/22/09.

⁸⁶ “Proposal to the Hewlett Foundation Education Program,” June 2006, 9.

⁸⁷ “Proposal to the Hewlett Foundation Education Program.” Yale University, Diana E. E. Kleiner, principal investigator. April 5, 2007, 18.

⁸⁸ Interview with Linda Lorimer, 3/6/09.

⁸⁹ Ibid.

⁹⁰ William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, “2009 Budget Memorandum: Education Program,” November 17, 2008, http://www.hewlett.org/programs/education-program.

⁹¹ Quoted in “Yale University: Yale Doubles Number of Free Online Courses.”