I recently “completed” my online course, “Introduction to the Old Testament (Hebrew Bible),” offered by Yale as part of a general initiative called “Open Yale Courses.” These courses were not created specifically as online courses. Rather, they appear to be regular Yale courses that were videotaped and recorded. The lectures, along with a syllabus and various course handouts, are posted online. Anyone can access the course material, but there is no mechanism for registering, and there is no way the the online student can get feedback or assess his/her understanding.
The lectures were very clear and easy to follow. The professor, Christine Hayes, was very well prepared and is a very engaging lecturer. I listened to the audio, and there were a couple of rough spots where she referred to something written on the board; this would probably not have been a problem if I had chosen to use the video instead. Unlike a regular lecture, I really liked being able to stop and replay short sections of the lecture when I needed to clarify a particularly complicated idea. There were 24 lectures and they provided a good overview of the topic. By way of comparison, a few years ago I listened to the “Great Courses” lecture series on the Old Testatment by Amy-Jill Levine from Vanderbilt, a leading authority on the subject. The Yale lectures were much more detailed both in their analysis of the text and their use of the secondary literature. The reading list for the course is fairly substantial.
The course had several drawbacks, however. First, the course was designed to be a real course with physically present students. While this was a straight lecture (she took exactly one question from a student in the course of 24 lectures), students had weekly discussion sections lead by TAs, and it was clear from comments made by Professor Hayes that she expected the TAs to introduce additional material from secondary sources during the discussion sections and that important topics would be discussed. While the readings themselves are accessible (but see below), the particular ideas she wanted her TAs to emphasize was not.
Second, the material for the online students was not well organized. It very much resembled a course syllabus that was converted into a series of web pages with links to the audio/video files, the transcripts and the handouts. It was laconic, and implicitly seemed to assume that a TA was available to handle questions. It included the readings for each session, but I was not able to find a comprehensive reading list with all the articles and books. I found the required textbooks, but many additional books and articles were referred to, and it would have been helpful to have a single list I could have used to accumulate the articles, or passed on to a reference librarian to get help in searching.
Third, while I feel that I have learned a lot about the Old Testament, and now have a pretty good foundation to move on to more specialized material (i.e., I have taken a 100 level course and now can take a 200 level course) I have no good way to get an objective assessment of my knowledge. The course is passively offered by Yale, and places all the onus on the student to engage with the material.
In my case, since I was doing this casually, I listened to the lectures and either read the particular passages assigned or relied on my general knowledge of them from having read them or listened to them in Church over the years. I did not have the time to dig into the extensive secondary literature, though I wish I had. Professor Hayes was trying to provide a good overview of the field, and was willing to discuss interpretations she did not agree with, but there were a couple of times her own preferred readings of the text were strained, and this suggested to me that there was more going on than she had time or inclination to discuss. Hopefully, the assigned readings in the literature would have made this clear.
In a nutshell, this material was very useful for me: I had some knowledge of the material and it deepened it and provided a good framework for organizing what it knew. The reading list provides me with a good source of further information. As a self-motivated student, I was well positioned to overcome the drawbacks I outlined above.
I could not, however, recommend this for an undergraduate student, unless he/she was extremely motivated, as the sole means of learning the material. It would be easier and better if a student just enrolled in our own Intro to the Old Testament course. However, I think the resources provided could be a useful adjunct to such a course. A faculty member could, for instance, assign the student to listen to lectures to either get another perspective on a topic or to reinforce what was already covered in lecture. I could also imagine requiring students to listen to the lectures and complete preparatory assignments before coming to class. This would allow the faculty member to either focus on a few specific topics or to devote more time to class discussion based on material. Of course, we often do this with the texts and the perennial problem is that students do not do the readings before class, so it is an open question if they would be more likely to watch the videos.