An issue worth consideration concerns the scope of Distance Education. Too often we may view distance education as online education and surely like a Venn diagram, the two areas do overlap. Distance Education, however, is broader and can include those forms of education that link the separate partners of the endeavor through print correspondence or television. But Distance Education is more popularly thought of as associated only with education via the internet. That’s actually the venue of online education.
Another consideration in the scope of Distance Education is the concept of Open Source Education. The distinction is that the latter embraces the idea and ideal of education for all, very much like the Lyceum Lectures of the 19th century. Open Source Education makes available to anyone with a computer courses on a variety of subjects and topics without the formalization (or tuition and credit) that attends to a traditional or online college course.
These courses don’t meet the rigid requirements of instructional design or the elements of online instructional strategies. The courses provide no synchronicity because there is no contact between instructor and learner. The courses, in a very few instances, may have a “study group” but the nature of the groups tends to address basic questions posed by the learner rather than provide guidance or direction for the course material. The groups actually are “manned” by people outside of the original course.
We’ve read often that it is wrong to transplant a traditional course into an online setting. The concept of “equity” inherently calls for an online course to adapt the traditional course and outfit it with different activities and tools that are intended to duplicate only the outcome of the original course. I took a look at the Open Yale Courses. I looked at courses in the classics and music, two of my interests, and found that basically the courses were merely transplants of original courses offered at Yale, in some cases four years old. The course on Ancient Greek History called for an “in-class midterm and final examination” but the course was originally presented in 2007. Do you think Professor Kagan is still willing to administer those assessments?
The Yale project did recognize the importance of multiple methods of presentation. A learner had the choice of html transcript, mp3 audio, or flash video as the means of delivering the course content. The courses were laid out according to the suggestions made in our text by Simonson, Smaldino, Albright, and Zvacek (2009, 249). Each course had a general overview, a syllabus and schedule of lessons, and an instructor biography. The course navigation was easy to follow.
According, though, to our understanding of instructional design for online/internet courses, the Yale, MIT, Stanford and I suspect any course offered by a recognized institution of higher learning (ivory tower) for Open Education do not meet the requirements for providing adequate synchronous or asynchronous communication. There are also no activities in which to engage a learner or assessments to determine whether the objectives of the course might be met.
Another “deficit” to Open Education courses is the lack of a design that is oriented around a specific audience. Instructional design considers the specific attributes of a course’s potential learner; the Open Yale Courses inherently acknowledge a universal liberal arts learner but nothing further than that description. Although there is a lack of interactivity and social learning via discussion or collaboration, the intent is to provide learning not otherwise available to a non-collegiate audience. The learner who willingly works through the lessons and limited assignments and readings does so because of an intrinsic interest in the subject or in learning and expanding his knowledge or understanding about life from a variety of perspectives – historical, political, current trends, scientific, etc. Getting credit or proving what he knows is of little concern to the learner whose interest is self-improvement.
So, perhaps the standards for Open Education courses should be different. It isn’t a case of holding these courses to the standards of online - for credit/tuition courses, but of devising criteria that acknowledge that Open Education is more anytime/anywhere than today’s typical online course. Open Education courses need to stand independent of the original institution in order to be available to learners at any future time.
References:
Simonson, M., Smaldino, S., Albright, M., & Zvacek, S. (2009). Teaching and learning at a distance: Foundations of distance education (4th ed.). Boston, MA: Pearson. Chapter 5, "Instructional Design for Distance Education."
Yale University, (2011). Open Yale Courses. Retrieved from http://oyc.yale.edu
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