Open Courses

I reviewed AFAM 162: African American History: From Emancipation to the Present on Yale’s open source. The course is broken down into 25 lectures. The lectures are videos recorded by the instructor. Learners have the option of purchasing the books for the class and taking a satisfaction survey. The course materials are on a downloadable zip drive. Along with each lecture there are assignments. The course seems to be laid out and pre-planned especially for distance learning. Each lecture is prerecorded and separated into chapters. The learner can click on each chapter to start the video. There are really no assignment that have to be posted by a due date. The assignments are just reading or either a video. The course is designed to be flexible and carter to the needs of distance learners. I also looked at other courses like Freshman Chemistry. Freshman chemistry has assignments that are due. The assignment can be found on the instructor’s website. The courses does follow some of the recommendations for online instruction. The course is broken up into modules, using other methods to present information such as videos, and has some type of assessment. In the chemistry course the designer provided many ways to maximize active learning for the students by providing problem sets and a contact method to contact the professor. I think the open courses should add asynchronous discussion so learning taking the course can communicate and share ideas. Open courses are a good thing for learners that just want to brush up of material or learn something new without paying the price of traditional courses. It also, allows learners to become acquainted with online (distance) learning. References http://oyc.yale.edu/ Simonson, M., Smaldino, S., Albright, M., & Zvacek, S. (2012). Teaching and learning at a distance: Foundations of distance education (5th ed.) Boston, MA: Pearson.