Open Source Learning

Yale Open Source Learning

There has been and continues to be shift from traditional Education & Learning to a much more open and collaborative learning settings.

Dr. Richard Baraniuk of Rice University professor explains the vision behind Connexions, his open-source, online education system. It cuts out the textbook, allowing teachers to share and modify course materials freely, anywhere in the world. The following link will take you to a great presentation by Dr. Richard Baraniuk on TED. I found it very informative and wanted to share it with you all.

http://www.ted.com/talks/richard_baraniuk_on_open_source_learning.html

I went to several Open Source resources to review and critique the design and delivery of an open source course. I utilized http://www.openculture.com/ to find my course of interest and ended up previewing a course by Professor Paul Bloom, of the Psychology Department at Yale University.

My general observations:

I found it very difficult to get into an open source course.
Many professed to be a frees course, but required registration and $$. Others were simply recordings. Finally, I found a pertinent topic with a complete course layout I could review. The links below can take you to the course layout.

In the class video the online student could not see any visuals.

The audio was not good and we could not hear the questions and Dr. Bloom did not repeat the questions the student had to ensure that DL heard all the questions.

There were two different topics put into this lecture, which was a bit confusing even though Dr Bloom did say he was going to do a brief re-cap form previous classes

I found the course layout, syllabus, sessions and downloads sections to be very simple and practical.

Dr Bloom recommended some books but again we as online learners were not able to see the visual references to the books, so we could take down the information

The course seems to be well planned for classroom training not specifically for distance learning.

Looking at the fundamentals of teaching online from our text (SSAZ 2009), I would say the course does not meet these standards.
A classroom training was "dumped" into an online session
The organization of the course structure with regard to it's written format (syllabus etc) was very organized and straight forward. The delivery lacked this fundamental.
Keeping students informed constantly....Open source courses do not allow for any interaction between participants and teacher.

To make a long story short....what I saw from this was a broadcast of a classroom session. I read several of my colleagues' blogs. I can't remember who made this point but very valid....You get what you pay for! It is great information but I would not consider this particular session I critiqued to be much of a learning session.


Introduction to Psychology with Professor Paul Bloom (lecture 20, The GoodLife: Happiness 2007)

http://oyc.yale.edu/psychology/introduction-to-psychology/

http://oyc.yale.edu/psychology/introduction-to-psychology/content/syllabus

http://oyc.yale.edu/psychology/introduction-to-psychology/content/class-sessions

http://oyc.yale.edu/psychology/introduction-to-psychology/content/downloads

yale.edu/psychology/introduction-to-psychology/content/survey

The Course Video

http://sylvan.live.ecollege.com/ec/crs/default.learn?CourseID=4894950&Survey=1&47=8472423&ClientNodeID=984650&coursenav=1&bhcp=1

Resources:

Simonson, M., Smaldino, S., Albright, M., & Zvacek, S. (2009). Teaching and learning at a distance: Foundations of distance education (4th ed.) Boston, MA: Pearson.

"Planning and Designing Online Courses"
Dr. George Piskurich and instructional technologist Jacqueline Chauser discuss the process and considerations for building an online course.

"Developing Online Courses"
This program illustrates the development phase for online courses.