This week our application project is to select a course from a free Open Course site and answer the following 3 questions:
- Does the course appear to be carefully pre-planned and designed for a distance-learning environment? How so?
- Does the course follow the recommendations for online instruction as listed in your course textbook?
- Did the course designer implement course activities that maximize active learning for the students?
As our Professor pointed out- do not confuse the terms “Open Course (Open Courseware)” and “Open Source (Open Source- ware)”, they are not one and the same. Granted Wikipedia is not a scholarly resource, its definition works well here:
Open Courseware (OCW) is a term applied to course materials in a virtual learning environment created by universities and shared freely with the world via the Internet (Wikipedia, n.d.).
Open-source software (OSS) is computer software that is available in source code form: the source code and certain other rights normally reserved for copyright holders are provided under a software license that permits users to study, change, improve and at times also to distribute the software (Wikipedia, n.d.).
So I visited the Open Yale courses and selected an interesting psychology open course titled PSYC 123: The Psychology, Biology and Politics of Food http://oyc.yale.edu/psychology/the-psychology-biology-and-politics-of-food. The content of this course is very interesting, and the information is presented in an interactive fun manner!
Question 1: Does the course appear to be carefully pre-planned and designed for a distance-learning environment?
Yes, this course appears to be carefully pre-planned; however I do not feel it was initially designed as a distance-learning course. Upon entering the course you are brought to the About the Course and About the Professor, where it details the course structure as follows: “This Yale College course, taught on campus twice per week for 75 minutes, was recorded for Open Yale Courses in Fall 2008”(Brownell, n.d.), this is the primary reason I feel this course was not originally designed to be a distance-learning course. Though the course content appears well designed, it was not created solely as a online learning course.
Question 2: Does the course follow the recommendations for online instruction as listed in your course textbook?
No, this course does not appear to follow the recommendations for online instruction as listed in our course textbook. Again, this could partly be due to the fact that the course was not originally designed for an online platform. Our course outlines the following categories for the unit-module topic model for delivered distance instruction:
- Organizational Guidelines
- Assessment Guidelines
- Content Guidelines
- Instruction/Teaching Guidelines
Organizational Guidelines
When course are planned the designer might want to use the Unit, Module, and Topic approach or model (UMT approach) as follows:
Assuming this course is a typical 3 credit course it should contain 3 units, 12 modules, 48 topics, and 48 learning outcomes (Simonson, et al., 2009) however the course appears to simply be comprised of 23 class sessions with no mention of units or modules.
Assessment Guidelines
“Assessment is directly related to learning outcomes. Normally there is at least one learning outcome for each topic...[with] 1 major assignment per unit and 1 minor assignment per two to three modules” (Simonson, et al., 2009). Though the course does not appear to have specific units and modules the course does contain several assessment components as described by the syllabus. The syllabus outlines the following components for grading: 
Content Guidelines
The course does a great job in outlining the required readings for each class session and providing streaming video of the professor and/or guest speaker giving lectures. All of the class sessions are available for download as well as two supplements. Students are required to purchase other text, as it is not provided. The Open course does not contain a method to conduct synchronous chats with content experts. All of the course content appears to be delivered in the same manner, the professor/speaker being recorded while lecturing to the class.
Instruction/Teaching Guidelines
“The pace of instruction for learners is a critical concern to the distance educator” (Simonson, et al., 2009) 
The course was not created as an online distance-learning program so many of these guidelines were not followed.
Question 3: Did the course designer implement course activities that maximize active learning for the students?
There appear to be many exercises incorporated into each lecture that causes in class interaction, dialogue, and active learning. It is hard to know if a course designer was involved with this process though. This Open Course was not designed with the purpose of being an online course so much of the text and activities are unavailable.Brownell, K. (n.d.). The Psychology, Biology and Politics of Food. Yale.edu. Retrieved July 31, 2011, from http://oyc.yale.edu/psychology/the-psychology-biology-and-politics-of-food
OpenCourseWare. (n.d.). Wikipedia. Retrieved July 31, 2011, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenCourseWare
Open-source software. (n.d.). Wikipedia. Retrieved July 31, 2011, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_software
Recommended Guidelines for structuring your online course. (2011, February 8). Valencia Learning Technology. Retrieved July 31, 2011, from http://vcclearningtech.wordpress.com/2011/02/08/recommended-guidelines-for-structuring-your-online-course/
Simonson, M., Smaldino, S., Albright, M., Zvacek, S. Teaching and Learning at a Distance: Foundations of Distance Education. (2009). Boston: Allyn & Bacon/Pearson
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