Yale Offers Three Science Courses In Free Online Program

Main Category: Medical Students / Training
Also Included In: IT / Internet / E-mail
Article Date: 17 Oct 2008 - 3:00 PDT

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Among the undergraduate offerings Yale University is making freely available by Internet access through the Open Yale Courses are three popular science courses in biomedical engineering, physics and astronomy.

"Frontiers of Biomedical Engineering," taught by professor W. Mark Saltzman, is newly added to the initial offerings of "Frontiers and Controversies in Astrophysics" by professor Charles Bailyn and "Fundamentals of Physics" by professor Ramamurti Shankar.

The courses, recorded in their entirety as they were taught to Yale College students in the classroom, are available in video and audio formats. Along with a closed-captioning option, the complete searchable transcript, syllabus, reading assignments and problem sets are available for each course.

Open Yale Courses at http://oyc.yale.edu/ is one of the most frequently visited Yale websites: more than half a million visitors from 187 countries having accessed the site since its debut. Faculty members around the world are using Open Yale Courses to teach their students in such locations as the University of Bahrain, the Instituto de Tecnologia de Buenos Aires, Tec de Monterrey in Mexico and Bogazici University in Turkey.

"We are pleased that so many people from around the globe have explored Open Yale Courses, whether they are students, teachers or those who just have a passion for a particular subject," said President Richard C. Levin. "Making part of the Yale classroom experience accessible beyond the campus through the available technology is a significant emphasis of our growing digital presence."

To encourage the widest possible use of the courses, the license that covers most of the lectures and other course material on Open Yale Courses is Creative Commons' Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 license, which permits the free use or repurposing of the Open Yale Courses material by others. The only restriction is that commercial use of the Open Yale Courses material is not allowed.

While anyone may download the audio or video files of Open Yale Courses or watch and listen to them streamed on the web at their convenience, there is no registration required and no credit is given for the courses.

Yale plans to add more courses to the project in the coming years. The production of these free courses for the Internet was made possible by a grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. The Open Yale Courses project is produced and supported by the Yale Center for Media and Instructional Innovation (CMI2), which promotes the innovative use of technology to enhance learning at Yale and beyond.

About the Faculty Who Teach the Science Courses

W. Mark Saltzman is the Goizueta Foundation Professor of Chemical and Biomedical Engineering at Yale University. His books include Drug Delivery: Engineering Principles for Drug Therapy and Tissue Engineering: Engineering Principles for the Design of Replacement Organs and Tissues, and his articles have appeared in Biomaterials and Nature Materials. The chair of the Department of Biomedical Engineering, Saltzman is also the recipient of numerous distinguished teaching awards from Yale, Johns Hopkins, Cornell and the University of Pennsylvania.

Charles Bailyn is the Thomas E. Donnelley Professor of Astronomy and Physics and Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Astronomy at Yale. He earned a B.S. in astronomy and physics from Yale in 1981 and a Ph.D. in astronomy from Harvard in 1987. His recent research efforts have focused on observations of binary star systems containing black holes and on stellar collisions in dense star clusters. He has lectured on "How To See a Black Hole" to school groups, Yale alumni, and amateur astronomical societies. He is the author of over 100 scientific papers, and his work was featured in the PBS mini-series, Mysteries of Deep Space.

Ramamurti Shankar is the John Randolph Huffman Professor of Physics and Professor of Applied Physics at Yale. He received his B. Tech in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology in Madras and his Ph.D. in theoretical particle physics from the University of California, Berkeley. He joined the Yale faculty in 1977 after three years at the Harvard Society of Fellows. He is dedicated to teaching and has published two texts: Principles of Quantum Mechanics and Basic Training in Mathematics: A Fitness Program for Science Students.

W. Mark Saltzman
Chemical
Biomedical Engineering

Charles Bailyn
Astronomy
Physics

Ramamurti Shankar
Applied Physics

Source:
Janet Rettig Emanuel
http://www.yale.edu