One great benefit of the open source class is that it is free. It allows the learner to have access to many classes that would often cost a great deal. Major institutions have begun to provide access to their courses online with open entry to all that have internet service to their computer. What a great source for the committed life-long learner to have the ability to see and learn what some of our better learning institutions are offering their students. This opportunity gives the average person the capability to see coursework in subjects that are their recreational passion in addition to their vocational passion.
I took the opportunity to indulge in the recreational passion of art history at the Open Yale courses site (http://oyc.yale.edu/). Examining this course, as well as skimming others too, I found that the primary practice for these courses from established face-to-face institutions was to simply place a visually recorded lecture of the traditional course on the internet as a link. Further, the availability of text transcripts of the lectures was available. I found that the opportunity to use and view these courses at the different sites was a major positive resource for many individuals. The amount of valuable, well organized, and trusted content that these courses make accessible is a rich source.
If I look at these courses through the lens of an Instructional Designer that is deliberately building a course for the sole purpose of online delivery, then I see areas that require improvement, additions, and different approaches. For this discussion I will use the example of the art history course posted at the Open Yale Courses site. The class that I used to investigate was a class on Roman Architecture. I purposely chose an art history class because I felt that the art history classroom would demand greater focus on the visual aspect of learning. Therefore, I wanted to see if adaptations were made from the standard lecture film that I had seen in many of the other courses distributed in open source. Surprisingly there were no changes made. Slides of artifacts that were projected on the lecture hall screen were no more prominent than the lecturer. An easy adaptation here could have been to zoom-in the camera to the artifact as the lecturer talked. This would have assisted in providing an increase in interesting visual interaction within the course (Simonson, Smaldino, Albright, and Zvacek, 2009) Also the format and link structure for the course was very simple and essentially provided for a link to the transcript files and the video at differing speed options. I found this to be true of other open source courses as well. The Open Source course does not attempt to embrace the viewer as a student enrolled in the class. In the text Teaching and Learning at a Distance: Foundation of distance education it is an important condition of online learning that the instructor must have knowledge of their students to be able to monitor more effectively over distance the learner’s motivation and understanding in the online learning environment (Simonson, Smaldino, Albright, and Zvacek, 2009) In this way there is not the consideration for activities that allow an instructor to get to know the student and then monitor or manage motivation through the course. The course makes no effort to assess what the viewer learns by using the course. This is the experience of most of the open course classes that I investigated.
There is no doubt in my mind that open source learning opportunities are of a huge value. They truly embrace the core of self-learning and provide the engine for many life-long learning experiences. Those learners with strong motivation and individualized goals will be able to utilize the information in open source classes to further advance their personal pleasure. Yet the open source class does not begin to replace the well-designed online classroom that encompasses instruction, dissemination of information, furnishing of learning activities, and the assessing and evaluating for complete understanding by the student of the topic covered.
References
Open Yale courses, http://oyc.yale.edu/.
Simonson, M., Smaldino, S., Albright, M., & Zvacek, S. (2009). Teaching and learning at a distance: Foundations of distance education (4th ed.) Boston, MA: Pearson.
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