Get Into Yale Free Card

Several schools, including MIT, offer content online for free, and Yale is now offering seven courses for interested people, including one in Modern Poetry, another in Psychology, and five others. MIT has oodles of cool content online, free and open to the public. Here's Yale's mission statement for their courses, noting the importance of critical thinking and learning:

Open Yale Courses provides free and open access to seven introductory courses taught by distinguished teachers and scholars at Yale University. The aim of the project is to expand access to educational materials for all who wish to learn.

Open Yale Courses reflects the values of a liberal arts education. Yale's philosophy of teaching and learning begins with the aim of training a broadly based, highly disciplined intellect without specifying in advance how that intellect will be used.

This approach goes beyond the acquisition of facts and concepts to cultivate skills and habits of rigorous, independent thought: the ability to analyze, to ask the next question, and to begin the search for an answer.

We hope these courses will be a resource for critical thinking, creative imagination, and intellectual exploration.

Emphasis is mine; discussion of curriculum and the purposes that informs it was on the agenda for today.