The Impact of Open Source

Review of Course

For this week’s blog application assignment, I chose to review an introductory astrophysics class for non-science majors.  The course is available on the Open Yale Courses website, entitled “Frontiers and Controversies in Astrophysics with Professor Charles Bailyn”.  The opening page of the course provides information about the course, and the professor, as well as the caveat that it was recorded from a face-to-face (F2F) session of the course taught during the Spring term of 2007 at Yale.  The side bar to the left of the main content includes links to the syllabus, class sessions, and downloads for the course.  The syllabus is atypically of what I would expect from a university course; there is no text book, rubrics, or list of class expectations or attendance (since this was originally presented as F2F).  There are guidelines for late submissions and collaboration listed in a supplemental syllabus, linked from the class syllabus.

The class session pages include information for each class session recorded by Dr. Bailyn’s team.  The page contains a textual overview of where the last session left off and what direction the discussion will take in the next session.  There are downloads for the learner of the lecture recording (transcripts, audio-only mp3 files, and/or Flash or Quicktime video files of the lecture based on internet connection speeds).  There are also PDF files of the presentation notes and links to other resources as they pertain to the individual lectures.  The additional resources are normally articles or websites for learners to explore, but occasionally the resource or assignment cannot be enacted by sole online learners, such as with the “Cosmology: The Game” during session 24.  Periodic problem set were assigned in the F2F course; the sets are included as PDF files as well as the corresponding solutions.

Applied as Distance Learning

From a distance learning (DL) perspective, the course is not very engaging to the learner.  The video sessions are long (~50 minutes) and simply of the professor presenting the material from a podium using the old overhead projector and transparencies, complete with Vis-à-vis markers.  The camera person does make an effort to record both the professor and the overhead through panning and zoom, but the audio is a bit soft as the DL learner cannot hear the F2F student questions to the professor in the video.  The course also has no interactive engagement between the instructor and DL learner or the DL learner to other students.

It does not appear to me that much preplanning (other than arranging for the audio/video crew) went into the course for the purpose of distance education.  Other than hosting and presenting the course material online, there are few to no provisions for DL learners to interact with the course.  There are no discussion boards, no interactive projects, no fellow DL learners with whom to communicate.  There is also no feedback from instructors on work or progress, as the solutions are already given for the DL learner to evaluate their own work.  I believe that the course would fall under the description of “shovelware”, where courses are simply transferred to the web or CMS with little regard to the differences in strategies for effective distance learning (Simonson, Smaldino, Albright, & Zvacek, 2012, p. 134).  The materials are not hosted on a course management system thereby ensuring that there is no tracking of progress either by the student for self-evaluative purposes or by the administration.

Distance Learning & Open Source

Despite the rather disappointing review, I believe that Open Source tools are valuable to the instructional designer.  As the materials are free and sometimes adaptable (provided that there is still adherence to all applicable copyright laws), Open Source tools, websites, and courses are still valuable resources to designing a course.  Open Source applications can be used to supplement a course’s resources or activities to further broaden a DL’s learning experiences.

Resources

Bailyn, C. (2007). Frontiers and controversies in astrophysics. Open Yale Courses. Retrieved February 3, 2012, from http://oyc.yale.edu/astronomy/frontiers-and-controversies-in-astrophysics

Simonson, M., Smaldino, S., Albright, M., & Zvacek, S. (2012). Teaching and learning at a distance: Foundations of distance education (5^th ed.). Boston, MA: Pearson Education, Inc.