The Impact of Open Source

Open Source is a free online learning initiative that offers online not-for-credit courses to anyone who wants to learn or teach. Two high-profile open courseware projects are the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Open CourseWare initiative through which MIT has placed materials from over a thousand courses online, and Rice University’s Connexions project. MIT Open CourseWare (OCW) is a web-based publication of virtually all MIT course content. OCW is open and available to the world and is a permanent MIT activity.

From the MIT open course offerings I selected a course from the Cross-Disciplinary Entrepreneurship group, ESD 801, Leadership Development. Check the course link below.

http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/engineering-systems-division/esd-801-leadership-development-fall-2010/.
The course page has menu items to the left containing the content available in the course. There is a syllabus, reading resources, and assignments. When the learner downloads the course materials, an offline version of the course is saved to the local computer. Accessing the interface is easy. The syllabus carefully outlines the distance learning to be experienced and includes a brief course overview, learning objectives, grading, calendar information about the sessions, topics and key dates, and Leadership Lunches; biographies of the invited guest speakers.

Does the course appear to be carefully pre-planned and designed for a distance learning environment? I cannot measure the amount of planning or lack of that went into this course. The basic information is made available to the learner but the lack of instructor presence and the inability for feedback means that learner is solely responsible for the engagement and motivation needed to complete the course of study. All the course textbooks are linked to a Buy at Amazon button; however there are sufficient web-based reading materials.

Does the course follow the recommendations for online instruction as listed in the course textbook? Of the eighteen principles defined by the “Guiding Principles for Faculty in Distance Learning” set out by the Indiana Partnership for Statewide Education (IPSE, 2000), this course shows some evidence of the following four:

1.      Distance learning courses will be carefully planned to meet the needs of students within unique learning context and environments.

2.      Learning activities are organized around demonstrable outcomes embedded in the course components…

3.      Content developed for distance learning courses will comply with copyright law.

4.      The medium/media chosen to deliver courses and/or programs will be … accessible to students, receptive to different learning styles, and sensitive to the time and place limitations of students.

The course activities do not maximize active learning as there is no interaction between the learner and the instructor. The learner has to compare completed assignments with the examples of completed assignments included with the course. Each assignment has four student examples for comparison. Very loosely the examples range from good to acceptable. The instructor did not include a rubric with the package.

References

Newman, Dava. ESD.801 Leadership Development, Fall 2010. (MIT OpenCourseWare: Massachusetts Institute of Technology), http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/engineering-systems-division/esd-801-leadership-development-fall-2010 (Accessed 5 Oct, 2013). License: Creative Commons BY-NC-SA.

Simonson, M., Smaldino, S., Albright, M., & Zvacek, S. (2012). Teaching and learning at a distance: Foundations of distance education (5th ed.) Boston, MA: Pearson. Chapter 4, "Technologies, The Internet, and Distance Education" (pp. 141). Chapter 5, "Instructional Design for Distance Education".