The Value of Open Courses

This week I explored one of the Open Yale courses to analyze the pre-planning and design of its instructional design.  I specifically reviewed the Biomedical Engineering course, found at http://oyc.yale.edu/biomedical-engineering/frontiers-in-biomedical-engineering/

The Open Yale Biomedical Engineering course is one of several open courses offered on the Yale website and is an amazing opportunity to take college level courses for free and in your own learning time frame.  This open course would be a perfect fit for retirees interested in learning new developments in particular industries or for students who do not need the college credit but wish to have the knowledge found in the available course.  This would not be a good option for a student who has not had prior experience in the featured industry or needs to gain the information for application purposes, such as a job setting.

The Open Yale Biomedical Engineering course is basically course management (Simonson, 2007, p.239) with the lecture materials posted to an online Course Management System (CMS) for other students to utilize to self-teach themselves asynchronously.  Each session of the course offers the session summaries with discussion questions and the recorded lecture; this course does not include the textbook or information on obtaining the textbook.  This course would be considered to be very teacher-centered and not utilizing the opportunities to be learner-centered that distance learning has to offer. (Simonson, 2007, pp.231- 232)  This course has all the information available but lacks distance learning strategies to increase students’ chances of successfully completing the course for application purposes.  The course does a nice job explaining the course content and gives a brief description of student requirements to complete the course but does not give any prerequisites for the course or any other background information that may preface the course’s content. 

The main feature of the course that caught my attention as a good distance learning technique was the ability to receive the lecture content in three different forms: text (transcript), audio, or video.  These different forms of the lecture are a good way to accommodate different learning styles as well as different students’ learning preferences. (Simonson, 2007)

So this open course format that is utilized for this course does give the opportunity of exposure to information that may not have been available in the past but does not show extensive instructional design pre-planning to be an effective distance learning course.

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