Yale University is joining the ranks of colleges such as MIT by making some courses freely available. According to Yale Daily News, the Opencourseware content will soon be available online:

"Members of the public no longer need a winning admissions essay to watch Harold Bloom's Shakespeare lectures, which are now available online as streaming video. And soon, anyone with access to the Internet will be able to listen to "Game Theory" lectures on Apple Computer's iTunes or use Microsoft's Live Search interface to virtually leaf through out-of-print books housed in the Beinecke Rare Book and manuscript Library.

The Open Educational Resources Video Lecture Project, developed last year and launched this fall, provides online access to popular talks and lectures through iTunes, and the Microsoft-Yale Project, which was announced in September, will digitalize 100,000 rare English-language books by the spring. The initiatives are designed to facilitate students' research efforts and provide those outside academia a glimpse into the richness of Yale's scholarly offerings, administrators said."

I've always believed that Opencourseware is a great way to give online learning a try without the pressure. As big colleges like Yale and MIT offer more free courses, hopefully others will follow suit.