Putting the Teaching Company Out of Business

If you read the New York Times Book Review or similar publications, you've probably noticed advertisements for "The Teaching Company," which sells audio recordings of college lectures. They've been around for a while and imagine NYT advertising space isn't cheap, so there must be a market here.  I've always been vaguely tempted to buy one, if only to pick up some of the stuff I missed while chronically skipping class as an undergraduate. But I haven't, primarily because it's expensive: they charge $270 for CD recordings and $199 for Internet downloads, which is a lot of money for a product with a marginal cost of production of essentially zero. I downloaded two albums by The Submarines from EMusic yesterday for less than ten clams total--that seems like a better deal.

Fortunately, there's now an alternative to giving The Teaching Company two hundred dollars. You can give Yale University no dollars for something better. The Open Yale Courses Web site, which debuted late last year, offers a raft of well-produced, full-video lecture courses in a variety of subjects, for free. This is a growing trend in higher education, and it raises a lot of interesting questions.  Such as: How can Yale give away a product it's selling to its students for $50,000 a year? The answer, of course, is that Yale isn't giving away the credentialing part of higher education, which is the key to maintaining the exclusivity on which all elite colleges are based. This is the subject of my new column in InsideHigherEd, published today.