The Impact of Open Source
This week, I participated in one of Yale University’s Open Courses. I chose ENGL 291 – The American Novel Since 1945, taught by Professor Amy Hungerford, for a number of reasons all centered upon my love of the English language and novel studies. I have previously read many of the texts discussed in this course, so I felt that I would be able to properly evaluate its impact as a distance learning course.
What immediately struck me was the availability of a variety of options for watching the course (flash or download with varying speeds). I appreciated the ability to chose how to watch each course section so that it best suited my current technological situation.
On the other hand, very few resources were offered to me as a learner, other than the syllabus and lecture videos. I understand that the face-to-face learners had no resources other than the texts that were required. I found that this was, unfortunately, a shovelware course as described by Simonson, in that the University chose to “shovel the course onto the Web and say you are teaching online” (2009, p. 248).
There was no evidence of careful pre-planning and designing for distance education.Yale did provide transcripts and a syllabus, but lacked any learning tasks that “encourage interactivity” (Simonson, 2009, p. 127). By failing to do this, they did not follow traditional recommendations for online instruction. Had they done so, the course would be much more interactive with a variety of technologies available to students. Learning was therefore not active for the learner. Instead, it was passive as I (as a learner) only watched videos and read new texts on my own time.
The course I took, The American Novel Since 1945, while fascinating in its content, lacked any real interactive features that I expect an online course to contain. This decreases its effectiveness as a distancing learning course to the point that it is merely a video of a face-to-face course available for viewing by the public.
This course can be found at: http://oyc.yale.edu/english/american-novel-since-1945
Simonson, M., Smaldino, S., Albright, M., Zvacek, S. (2009). Teaching and Learning at a Distance: Foundations of Distance Education (4th Ed.). Boston, MA: Pearson.
