As a life long learner who has attended several colleges and is working on a second master’s degree, I am always interested in what course offerings prestigious colleges and universities have. For this weeks application, we were asked to look at open source courses that are available on the internet. I was very surprised to learn that many of the most prestigious universities in the country had open source courses that were available for free on the internet. Yale, Stanford and MIT all have classes that are available for free.
For this application, I chose to analyze an open source course from MIT. The course is titled America in Depression and War and is available at http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/history/21h-126-america-in-depression-and-war-spring-2003/index.htm
The course seems to be very thoroughly planned and designed for a distance learner to complete the course independently. The course has very specific readings that are linked together through Amazon.com so that the student may purchase the texts. There are also supplemental resources for students to look at such as primary source documents and photographs from the time period. Specific assignments are also listed as well as a week-by-week timeline of the course.
While I believe that this course is applicable and interesting for someone simply wanting to take a class on this time period, there are a few aspects that are seriously lacking as far as current recommendations for on-line learning. First of all, the class is done completely independently. There is no forum for discussion or student interaction. There is an email address for the teacher, but the student would have to seek out the teacher interaction. I believe that not having a discussion for students to participate in is a distinct fall back of this class. “The threaded discussion is one of the most powerful techniques used in distance education” (Simonson, Smaldino, Albright, & Zvacek, p. 186, 2007).
The activities that students are asked to do in this course are essay based. Based on the reading requirements that students are asked to complete, they have an essay to build off of. While this is very standard in many face-to-face-classes, I found that in my experience in distance education this is not always true. One of the reasons why I have found distance education to work so well for me is the opportunity for creativity. I have been able to explore with web 2.0 tools and create websites as applications for my learning.
Overall, I believe that this course does not meet the foundational requirements of distance learning because of the lack of student collaboration, however I am certain that this course would be an excellent choice for someone who is simply more interested in a correspondence type of course where they are responsible for the materials and learning completely independently.
Resouces:
Simonson, M., Smaldino, S., Albright, M., & Zvacek, S. (2009). Teaching and learning at a distance: Foundations of distance education (4th ed.) Boston, MA: Pearson.
Wednesday, July 27, 2011
Tuesday, July 12, 2011
Distance Learning-Application 3
The task this week:
A high school history teacher, located on the west coast of the United States, wants to showcase to her students new exhibits being held at two prominent New York City museums. The teacher wants her students to take a "tour" of the museums and be able to interact with the museum curators, as well as see the art work on display. Afterward, the teacher would like to choose two pieces of artwork from each exhibit and have the students participate in a group critique of the individual work of art. As a novice of distance learning and distance learning technologies, the teacher turned to the school district’s instructional designer for assistance. In the role of the instructional designer, what distance learning technologies would you suggest the teacher use to provide the best learning experience for her students?
As a high school history teacher I try consistently to give my students the most authentic experience possible. I have been in this teacher's shoes of wanting my students to have access to something that technology can make possible. For this teacher, I would recommend 2 different Web 2.0 tools to tackle this problem.
First of all, the teacher wants students to be able to "be" at a museum. This is easier said than done as the teacher will need help from the museums end to make this happen. I believe that a podcast would be an excellent method for integrating a virtual field trip. Students could actually see pieces of art, and listen to the curators. With any luck, the museum would have something like this available, but if not, there are several options that the teacher could do. Through the use of Web 2.0 tools, there are several teacher sites such as classroom2.0 where teachers can collaborate and help each other out. It would be very possible to find a teacher in the New York area to go and film the museum and upload the video to a CMS, in exchange for the West-Coast teacher doing the same thing close to her. (Side note: In my classroom, I constantly am collaborating with a history teacher who lives in North Carolina. We have never met each other face to face, but I collaborate more with him than I do members of my own school department. Finding a teacher to collaborate in the project is extremely feasible.)
The second piece of technology that I would recommend to this teacher to critique a piece of art is a wiki. Using a wiki, the teacher can upload a picture, invite the students to comment and then have a learning discussion where students are able to critique and discuss the piece of art. The beauty of a wiki is that the teacher invites students so each student has their own screen name and so individual tracking is easy. A wiki is also an incredible way to have a discussion with your students, and as a school district instructional designer, I believe that every teacher should have a classroom wiki site.
A high school history teacher, located on the west coast of the United States, wants to showcase to her students new exhibits being held at two prominent New York City museums. The teacher wants her students to take a "tour" of the museums and be able to interact with the museum curators, as well as see the art work on display. Afterward, the teacher would like to choose two pieces of artwork from each exhibit and have the students participate in a group critique of the individual work of art. As a novice of distance learning and distance learning technologies, the teacher turned to the school district’s instructional designer for assistance. In the role of the instructional designer, what distance learning technologies would you suggest the teacher use to provide the best learning experience for her students?
As a high school history teacher I try consistently to give my students the most authentic experience possible. I have been in this teacher's shoes of wanting my students to have access to something that technology can make possible. For this teacher, I would recommend 2 different Web 2.0 tools to tackle this problem.
First of all, the teacher wants students to be able to "be" at a museum. This is easier said than done as the teacher will need help from the museums end to make this happen. I believe that a podcast would be an excellent method for integrating a virtual field trip. Students could actually see pieces of art, and listen to the curators. With any luck, the museum would have something like this available, but if not, there are several options that the teacher could do. Through the use of Web 2.0 tools, there are several teacher sites such as classroom2.0 where teachers can collaborate and help each other out. It would be very possible to find a teacher in the New York area to go and film the museum and upload the video to a CMS, in exchange for the West-Coast teacher doing the same thing close to her. (Side note: In my classroom, I constantly am collaborating with a history teacher who lives in North Carolina. We have never met each other face to face, but I collaborate more with him than I do members of my own school department. Finding a teacher to collaborate in the project is extremely feasible.)
The second piece of technology that I would recommend to this teacher to critique a piece of art is a wiki. Using a wiki, the teacher can upload a picture, invite the students to comment and then have a learning discussion where students are able to critique and discuss the piece of art. The beauty of a wiki is that the teacher invites students so each student has their own screen name and so individual tracking is easy. A wiki is also an incredible way to have a discussion with your students, and as a school district instructional designer, I believe that every teacher should have a classroom wiki site.
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