Pepin the Short, Louis the Pious, Charles the Bald.
Are they familiar characters for you? They did not qualify as household words for me until this summer. That’s when I took a course in medieval history, presented by Yale University.
Yale had never touched my academic life. Till now.
But my friend David’s experience led me to discover Yale courses online—a treasure trove, rich in content and easy of access.
David recommended that I begin with “The Early Middle Ages, 284 – 1000.” Taught by Professor Paul Freedman, the course includes 22 live lectures, all of which I have now watched and listened to with fascination.
Students are in the classroom, but viewers see only the backs of a few heads. However, the professor speaks directly to them rather than to us onlookers.
To take this course, or any others in the 23 fields Yale offers, we outside viewers need do very little. No registration, no academic requirements, no money to be paid, no assigned time to watch. However, Yale demands that you be at least 13 years old!
To begin, you need only open a computer (or other device), type in “Yale” on Google, choose “Open Yale Courses,” click on one of the fields of study, and choose among the courses. You are then prepared to receive the lectures in video, audio, and text transcript formats.
Yale is not the only university to offer free courses online. It just happens to be the one that I discovered first.
MIT and Stanford figure prominently among those others that do. Tapping into MIT’s open courses reveals forty different areas in a number of fields, not limited to science and engineering.
Indeed, the floodgates are opening; this summer brings news of online courses offered, or soon to be offered, by a number of major public and private universities.
The technology of the future allows historians to bring the past to life in new ways. And the Internet can also be an effective vehicle for the old-fashioned lecture—not usually my favorite educational method, but one that Paul Freedman uses engagingly.
I write about online learning here because I regard it as a bonanza for people approaching retirement and those already retired. It offers opportunities that cost nothing and create a stimulus for continued learning.
In this instance, the online course afforded me an opportunity to revisit characters and events encountered long ago and half forgotten.
Pepin, for example, was the father of the 9th century emperor Charlemagne; Louis was his son, Charles his grandson. We do not know for sure if they were, respectively, short, pious, and bald.
But the course’s themes were far-reaching. Following the lectures, I learned more about the Roman Empire and its fifth-century collapse. So, too, the rise of Byzantium, the eastern part of the empire that played such an important part in the history of succeeding centuries. And so did the various invasions of the barbarians who helped reshape the future landscape of Europe.
Religious struggles were central during this period, when Christianity became established in the Empire. At that time, the definition of basic doctrines led to bitter debates and, not rarely, violence.
The rise of Islam also had a paradoxical but vital role in defining the medieval world. Eventually Europe would develop as France and Germany moved toward their own identities.
It was enjoyable to wonder how Yale undergraduates were taking in this material. Presumably much of it was largely new to these young people. In any case, their experience of history was inevitably different from mine. How they will apply their learning remains unknown.