The Impact of Open CourseWare

The Impact of Open Courseware

Open source software is intended to be freely shared and can be improved upon and redistributed to others (Simonson et al p 141).  OpenCourseWare (OCW) is a free and open digital publication of high quality college and university level educational materials.  These materials are organized as courses, and often include course planning materials and evaluation tools as well as the content.  OpenCourseWare are free and openly licensed, accessible to anyone, anytime via the internet (OpenCourseWare Consortium n.d.) As a part of my analysis I reviewed a course from an Open Course site. I selected the Open Yale Course one because I was intrigued to see if an ivy league higher education systems was a step above the university I attend are their students better equipped for distance education success or do they all pretty much the same pre-planning and planning activities associated with distance education.

From the homepage I’ve already noticed they’ve done their planning and considered all learning styles for the courses offered. All of the courses are available in video, audio and text transcript formats.  Using all of these types of media address all of the learning styles.  Learning styles is one of the major factors in successful learning at a distance (Simonson et al p. 226). Additionally the analysis upfront of the learner characteristics has been thought out and under Terms of Use there are references to age restrictions for the use of the Open courses at Yale.  What I did notice so far is none of the above noted information is located in one place.  I had to select different tabs within the site to discover this information.

There are a list of courses, syllabi, which is critical to preparing students for expectations course work due and when throughout the course (Piskurich, G. n.d.).  It includes course reading and applications assignments in the form of problem sets.

A couple of opportunities I noticed with the setup and introduction of the Yale open courses.  It appears that they provide very little orientation for individuals who may not be familiar with Open Course sites.  The course I specifically reviewed called Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner provided an overview of the course, how the course was structured and course materials which could be downloaded.  I was still unsure of my PC/technology requirements.  It wasn’t until I selected the introduction to the course that I was able to view the audio, video and how the transcripts where made available.

These are all past courses that were taught at Yale and have been made available.  After reviewing this course and the associated syllabus, I saw very little interactivity for the learner other than the downloading of the transcripts, listening to the audio and viewing the lecture online. The Designer had no other activities for the distance learner and there were none included in the syllabus to account for distance learning. Only the short paper and term papers that was required.

In conclusion, the format is very streamlined for distance learning. It does follow the distance learner pre-planning vaguely but it does not appear this site is for the novice with distance learning or open course sites.

References

Open Yale Courses: A free open website offering a number of introductory courses taught by Yale University professors. http://oyc.yale.edu/

Piskurich, G.( n.d.). Planning and designing online courses. Retrieved May 30, 2012. https://class.waldenu.edu/webapps/portal/frameset.jsp?tab_tab_group_if=2_1&url=%2fwebapp%fblackboarrd%2fececute%2Flauncher%3Ftype%3Dcourse%26id%3d_549515_1%26url%3d

Simonson, M. Smaldino, S., Albright, S., Zvacek, S. (2012). Teaching and Learning at a Distance Foundations of distance education Fifth edition, Pearson