The Impact of Open Source

I had never heard of “open courses” before this week. I was unaware that there were free instructional courses widely available online for anyone to access and use. I have had experience with online courses from websites such as Lynda.com, and other websites that require a paid membership. However, was not aware of the website that offer free educational courses beside the short instructional videos sometimes offered on youtube.com. In this week’s resources we were offered a great amount of guidance on how to identify properly planned and implemented courses. These guidelines will help me to not only prepare my own modules but it will also help me to identify open courses that will truly help educate me.

For this assignment I chose to focus on the open course website oyc.yale.edu. This website offered a number of open course including, Astronomy, English and Music. The course that caught my eye was the Astronomy open course entitled “Frontiers and Controversies in Astronomy” with Charles Bailyn. Luckily I have prior interest in topics of astronomy and this was a pleasant surprise. Upon my investigation of this open course I was struck by how well planned it seemed. The approach was straight forward. The course was to be conducted twice a week and each course would be fifty minutes long. As mentioned in this week’s read from “Teaching and Learning at a Distance – Foundations of Distance Education” the structure of the course serves to provide guidance for the students and allow them to learn in balanced units of education.

Other recommendation offered by or text this week was that the instructor (and course development team) consider a number of things including the course components, learner type, delivery and materials and learning environment. I believe that this open course takes into account all of these elements. For example, this course has preset textbooks that the learners should acquire to promote their learning success. This is a preplanned approach to satisfying the need for course materials to support the learner’s understanding of course topics. And in consideration of the online environment all of these texts are available electronically or for delivery, which is easy on the learners involved.

Although this course is well structured it does lack an interactive element. It does offer student’s video lectures on youtube.com but it does not offer much in terms of group activities (which, in my experience, are not as helpful as they are stated to be anyway). According to our class textbook this, group element, is highly important. So, I would conclude that this course is lacking an interactive side. The guidelines offered this week have truly helped me to prepare for building my own modules and learning from quality learning establishments, online and otherwise.

Assignment Resources:

Simonson, M., Smaldino, S., Albright, M., & Zvacek, S. (2012). Teaching and Learning at a Distance – Foundations of Distance Education (Fifth ed., pp. 152-180). Boston, MA: Pearson Education, Inc.

Yale University 2013. (2007). Frontiers and Controversies in Astronomy with Charles Bailyn. In Open Yale Courses. Retrieved April 5, 2013, from http://oyc.yale.edu/astronomy/astr-160#overview