Open Courses

With the recent advances in distance education, many different schools are starting to offer their classes online for free, these classes are known as Open Courses. They are allowing “anyone to take quality courses entirely for free. The incentive for taking these courses is not college credit, but rather to simply acquire knowledge or engage in a unique learning experience”. (Laureate Education, Inc.) Schools like Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Yale and Stanford are offering this new concept of learning.

I researched an Open Course from Professor Richard D. Wolff at the New School University in New York, the course I reviewed was titled Economic Crisis and Globalization (rdwolff.com/content/economic-crisis-and-globalization), this course was a link on Openculture.com. The course meets the textbook definition of shovelware, as defined in Simonson, Smaldino, Albright & Zvacek, which is a term that has evolved to describe shoveling a “course onto the Web and say you are teaching online, but don’t think about it much”. (2009, p. 248) The course is just a video recording of his classroom lectures, that has a run time of 10 hours, 30 minutes. I don’t see how this course could have had more then a minimal amount of pre-planning before production started.

Richard D. Wolff’s site has all the content that you would expect from a Web 2.0 focused learning site, but it’s disorganized and hard to follow. The site offers blogs, podcasts, videos and audio. Then there is another section for online classes, which only offer videos of classroom lectures. There are no activities, quizzes or documents to download to follow along with.

Overall, I don’t see how this course is anything more then a face-to-face class that was recorded and uploaded to the Web. There seems to be little to no pre-planning that was evolved in the process. The class doesn’t follow any of the recommendations for online instruction, and lastly there aren’t any activities to download to go along with the course. As a distance-learning course it misses the mark on every account.

References:

Simonson, M., Smaldino, S., Albright, M., & Zvacek, S. (2009). Teaching and learning at a distance: Foundations of distance education (4th ed.). Pearson Publishers.

Laureate Education, Inc. (2010). Week 5: Designing for Distance Learning: Part I - Application [Web]. Baltimore, MD