Yale University to review its position regarding online training

Administrators at Yale University have reconsidered the institution's role in online education and could roll out more digital courses in the coming years.

Last Friday (September 21st), Yale college dean Mary Miller called for the formation of an ongoing committee in an email to discuss the university's position regarding e-learning, the Yale Daily News reports.

The committee plans to analyse trends and gather feedback on current online education technology, the Open Yale Courses and Yale Summer Session Online.

Ms Miller was quoted as saying: "I hope that the committee can explore whether there are ways to continue to expand the number of students around the country and the world who could benefit from the outstanding teaching of Yale faculty."

She added that this was to be done without harming the experience of the university's students or taking up too much of the faculty's time.

Craig Wright, co-chair at Yale, commented that the committee will discuss various options for digital education at the university, such as partnerships with online platforms and the development of for-credit courses.

Committee members will be able to submit recommendations on the topic by the end of the year to Paul Bloom, Mr Wright's fellow chair.

He claimed that online learning at Yale "is getting very big and important" and the committee will consider every aspect of the technology that it can.

One online platform likely to be considered by the committee at Yale is Coursera, who has had a global reach of 1.3 million since it was launched six months ago and has provided its services to institutions such as Brown, Penn and Princeton.

Yale was one of first universities to supply online education, following the introduction of its Alliance for Lifelong Learning project alongside Stanford and Oxford in 2001.

Although it was discontinued in 2006, president of the scheme Kristin Kim said that 11,000 students from over 70 nations had enrolled in its courses.