Evaluation of Open Yale Course

This week I visited the open course site offered by Yale at http://oyc.yale.edu/.  In opening line, the course website states, “Open Yale Courses provide free and open access to a selection of introductory courses taught by distinguished teachers and scholars at Yale University” (http://oyc.yale.edu/).  This advertisement certainly catches the eye of many adult learners seeking further education, and at no cost!  The site also states that there is no registration required to take the course and there is no credit, degree, or certificate is available through the course website.

There are several courses offered through Open Yale Courses.  I chose to click on an English course entitled ENGL 300: Introduction to the Theory of Literature.  The course URL is as follows:  http://oyc.yale.edu/english/engl-300.  All course material are downloadable on the course page and the lectures, previously recorded, are available for listening.  The course offers twenty-six lectures on the topic of twentieth-century literary theory.   A book is available for purchase online, otherwise the only content for reading in the downloadable text.  “The ideal online course should not have the primary learning resource online” (Carr‐Chellman & Duchastel, 2000, p. 233).  According to this statement, the course is not applying best practices for a normal online course.  The course description is as follows:

“This is a survey of the main trends in twentieth-century literary theory. Lectures will provide background for the readings and explicate them where appropriate, while attempting to develop a coherent overall context that incorporates philosophical and social perspectives on the recurrent questions: what is literature, how is it produced, how can it be understood, and what is its purpose?” (http://oyc.yale.edu/).

This objective leaves room for changes to be made based on learner needs, if changes needed to be made to the course in the future.  “Broadly stated goals are a helpful starting place for the instructor” (Simonson et al., 2012, p. 158).  The designers of the Yale open course seemed to have this in mind when creating the course.  There is room for producing coursework around the topic in many different ways. 

The objective has stayed the same for this online course as it was for the face-to-face course.  As stated in Simonson et al. (2012), “The objective of a lesson may not necessarily change simply because and instructor teaches at a distance” (p. 158).  The open course is compiled of classroom lectures which were recorded by video.  The videos are available for the learner to watch.  Learners have the option of simply listening to the recording, watching the video of the lecture, or reading the lecture in print.  This caters to the different ways students learn, although it is the same information provided in different ways.    

As many of these open courses become available online through universities, there are networks of learners coming together to discuss their learning.  MOOC, or massive open online course, provides tools for “lifelong learners can use various tools to build and manage their own learning communities” (Fini, 2009, p. 5).  This means if learners want to use “blogs, social networking, wikis, messaging systems, etc.,” as mentioned in Fini (2009), they could create their own learning community with others.

My main concern with the open course Yale is providing is that it is strictly lectures.  For some learners, this is not a way of retaining information.  I understand the courses are free, so I guess one cannot ask for discussions among peers.  In my personal opinion, I would rather pay for a course designed to cater to the needs of me as a learner, and actually retain the information.  Simonson et al. (2012) describes twelve “golden rules” proposed by Bates for distance education (p. 175).  One of those rules is “interaction is essential” among the student and teacher (Simonson et al., 2012, p. 176).  This rule is said to be “well accepted by those in distance education” (Simonson et al., 2012, p. 176).  If this is the case, and we are strictly looking at this course through the eyes of what good instruction is, then I do not feel this course is one that can offer much to me as a learner.  There will be no interaction with other students or with the instructor.  Learners can see other students in the class during the recording interacting with the instructor, but that is all.

The difficulty I find with comparing this course to other distance education courses I am familiar with is that it is free.  I think the idea of getting online and watching a lecture is certainly not for everyone.  On the other hand, the idea of having access to the information from a well-educated professor is quite appealing.  The design of the course I have reviewed begins with introductory information, leads into more in-depth lectures, and is complete after a reflection.  The overall design of the class is well thought out from an instructional design perspective.  The course is lacking a very important aspect for many learners, which is interactivity. 

 

Resources

Carr‐Chellman, A., & Duchastel, P. (2000). The ideal online course. British Journal of Educational Technology, 31(3), 229-241.

Fini, A. (2009). The technological dimension of a massive open online course: The case of the CCK08 course tools. The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 10(5).

Open Yale Course.  Retrieved from http://oyc.yale.edu/
Simonson, M., Smaldion, S., Albright, M. & Zvacek, S. (2012).  Teaching and learning at a distance:  Foundations of distance education (5th ed.) Boston, MA: Pearson.