Open Courseware Evaluation

Open Culture
http://www.openculture.com/

 

My Walden University masters course provided the above open course resource link for evaluation  and I was blown away by this index of extraordinarily valuable resources in all content areas and in various methods of delivery:  podcasts, video casts, PDFs, course sites, etc.  This link is well worth anyone’s time in exploring for any area of interest.  However, I wanted to evaluate a specific open course so I went straight to the LINK for the single Journalism course listed since I teach two Journalism classes. This link goes directly to a YouTube video lecture of a UCLA professor teaching one of his college classes in Journalism and there are several more recorded lectures from this course in the YouTube sidebar.  While the lecture is very informative, it is not the best practice for an online course according to the criteria established in our course text. It does not appear to be carefully pre-planned and designed for a distance learning environment at all.  It does not provide any of the following nine fundamentals of teaching online recommended in chapter four of our text on pages 134-137:

• Avoid “Dumping” a Face-to-Face Course onto the Web

• Organize the Course and Make the Organization and Requirements Clear to Students

• Keep Students Informed Constantly

• Think about Course Outcomes

• Test Applications, Not Rote Memory

• Integrate the Power of the Web into the Course

• Apply Adult Learning Principles with Nontraditional Students

• Extend Course Readings Beyond the Text

• Train Students to Use the Course Website    

(Simonson, M., Smaldino, S., Albright, M., & Zvacek, S., 2012, pp. 134-137)

                                                                                   

There were no “powerful opportunities for resource utilization, collaboration, and communication: (Simonson et al., 2012, p. 136), no “options for customization” (p. 136), no “plethora of online resources” (p. 137) built in, no “online tutorials” (p. 137), no “announcements tools”(p. 135) such as a syllabus, email capabilities or “calendar, activities, and expectations” (p. 134) or outlines of any sort, and there was no form of “student assessment” (p. 135). Plus, I just didn’t appreciate the poor sound quality besides.  Basically, the course was deficient in most every regard especially in that it does not implement any course activities that maximize active learning for the students.  The only sense of interaction a student, or should I simply say a "viewer," gets is the occasional questions asked of the lecturer by students who remain invisible in the video as they sit outside the camera's scope.  "It is imperative to activate higher-order thinking skills" (Simonson et al., 2012, p. 135) for learners, but this course simply encourages a couch potato to sit back, view, listen and eat popcorn.

Apparently, I am not the only one who does not consider UCLA’s offerings as worthy enough to be called courseware.  HERE is a great article written in 2010, by one critic who asserts that video streaming a lecture does not make a course.  Additionally, the article details how UCLA was pressured to suspend their YouTube videos due to copyright infringement accusations.  Very Interesting!  Chapter 10 of our course text teaches on these intimidating legal concerns (Simonson et al., 2012. P. 295), but just to take a bit of scare out of this one case, HERE is another article (really it’s a kind of press release) which explains UCLA’s move to safeguard themselves on the federal copyright act.  UCLA even developed a set of guidelines for its faculty to use streaming video as found at this LINK.  WOW!  Who thought it would be so tricky to launch a course online?!

While it’s true that “the literature abounds with guidelines for distance education [see (Beldarrain, 2006, p. 144)] and identifies ‘best practices’ of distance education, [still] common threads have emerged”(Simonson et al., 2012, p. 178).  While you should not abandon the Open Culture resource because there are many numerous courses there that do fulfill best practices for distance education, ultimately, I like this list as the best one for evaluating whichever open course you choose:  

“1. Instructors should provide clear guidelines for interaction with students.

2.      Well-designed discussion assignments facilitate meaningful cooperation among students.

3.      Students should present course projects.

4.      Instructors need to provide two types of feedback:  information feedback and acknowledgement feedback.

5.      Online courses need deadlines.

6.      Challenging tasks, sample cases, and praise for quality work communicate high expectations.

7.      Allowing student to choose project topics incorporates diverse views into online courses” (Simonson et al., 2012, p. 179).

References

Beldarrain, Y. (2006). Distance education trends: Integrating new technologies to foster
student interaction and collaboration. Distance Education, 27(2),139–153.

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