Designing for Distance Learning

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.