Week 5: Open Courses

The Impact of Open Courses

Open courses are becoming popular as a way to gain knowledge in various topics ranging from astronomy to women’s studies through legitimate colleges and universities (usually)free of charge. Although there were many open course sites to choose from I decided to take a deeper look at Open Yale Courses. Specifically an American Studies course AMST 246: Hemingway, Fitzgerald , Faulkner. http://oyc.yale.edu/american-studies/amst-246
There is no credit given to the person for taking the course the site describes who the courses are for and why they would be beneficial to take the time to enroll.
What Yale Open courses are:
The online courses are designed for a wide range of people around the world, among them self-directed and life-long learners, educators, and high school and college students. The integrated, highly flexible web interface allows users, in effect, to audit Yale undergraduate courses if they wish to. Through its Open Educational Resources (OER) initiative, launched in 2001, the Hewlett Foundation "seeks to use information technology to help equalize access to knowledge and educational opportunities across the world." The initiative supports "the development and dissemination of high quality content, innovative approaches to remove barriers to the creation, use, re-use and sharing of high quality content, and projects that seek to improve understanding of the demand for openly available content." Visit http://www.hewlett.org.

Does the course appear to be carefully pre-planned and designed for a distance learning environment? Somewhat. The syllabus lists the texts being covered, the requirements of the student which include: section participation, two papers and a final exam. The only confusion I have is I cannot seem to find further explanation of the section participation. There are a total of 25 lectures. Each lecture has four options for obtaining the information. 1) Transcript (html), 2) audio (mp3), 3) Low bandwidth video and 4) high bandwidth video. Giving the learner options on how to obtain the information will help satisfy various learning styles. What I found to be smartly done by the designer of this course was to breakdown each lecture into lecture chapters. For example a 48 minute lecture is broken down into 8 chapters so if you do not have time listen to the entire lecture in one sitting you do not need to start from the beginning to finish it later.

Does the course follow recommendations for online instruction as listed in the course text? Simonson, Smaldino, Albright & Zvacek state: it is frustrating for students to begin in online course only to find that all the materials are not prepared or accessible at the time they need them (p.163). I feel the way the lectures are set up show a very well prepared aspect of the course as they are all available right away. On the flip side, understanding the learners is not going to be considered the way described in our textbook for an open course. Meaning the abilities of the class, learner characteristics, the context of learning experiences are not examined in an open course. The thought is the type of person seeking out an open course is a self-motivated, lifelong learner.

Did the course designer implement course activities that maximize active learning for the students? I am not finding active learning opportunities for this course. As I stated earlier there is mention in the syllabus that section participation is part of the requirements however, I am unable to find what this entails or where to go on the site to participate. The “kiss of death” for any distance course if the lack of student participation (Simonson, Smaldino, Albright & Zvacek p. 201). As far as I could find there was not active learning activities in this course.

  KWK

References:
Simonson, M., Smaldino, S., Albright, M., & Zvacek, S. (2012). Teaching and learning at a distance: Foundations of distance education (5th ed.) Boston, MA: Pearson.