Sunday, October 7, 2012

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Week 5 Blog Assignment : Open Course Analysis
HIST 119:The Civil War and the Reconstruction Area
By Carie Jackson

            Open courseware classes are free online learning experiences available to anyone who decides to take them. In the past few years many colleges and universities have started offering class lectures, notes and assignments online for free. Many of the classes are very comprehensive ( Education Insider 2012).

            I choose to  review a course from Yale , HIST 119 The Civil War and Reconstruction Era  1847-1877 taught by Professor David B Blight. (http://oyc.yale.edu/history/hist-119).

Course Planning
            Open Yale offers course free of charge in a variety of subjects. They contain selected lectures and other materials (About OYC, 2012). The course  layout is easy to navigate and includes a syllabus and links to the 27 different lectures which are elements of effective online course design (Simonson, Smaldino, Albright, & Zvacek 2012. The lectures are videos of the actual lectures given when the class was given. The course also includes recommended readings and essay assignments. You can download the course materials which also include lecture notes in pdf form. Videos are also available for free from itunes. All the course content is easily accessible with no registration or login required.

            It is clear that the course has been carefully planned. However, this is a case of simply taking a face-face course and putting it online. There have been no changes to make the course more online learner friendly.

Online learning activities
The class consists of 27 lessons. Each lesson has a video taped lecture with available transcripts if needed. There is also a set of reading assignments for the section. The learning is completely self paced as nothing is turned into an instructor. Simonson et al. (2012) discussed that -one of the characteristics of a distance learner was that they wanted to have as much control over their learning as possible.

There are many draw- backs to this type of online learning experience. Most of the class are archived classes. The online learner is basically just reviewing the material presented in class. There is no contact between class participants or between student and instructor. There is no collaboration among the students and no feedback from the instructor. These are all key points to ensuring an active learning environment.
The class is not interactive nor is it very engaging. Watching a 55 minute lecture on line will not engage many learners. These online courses may provide learning opportunities for people around the world but for many the lack of interactive learning will not make the learning meaningful and lasting.

These open courseware classes serve an important purpose for those students who are interested in a course but do not want to spend the time or money to take it for credit. But to be an effective distance learning course there needs to be modifications to make the course more interactive and engaging.

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