The Impact of Open Source

The Impact of Open Source

The concepts presented in this week’s resources have given a framework for the instructional designer. The framework for the online course is very important for the construction of the course. The Instructional Designer must start with a Story Board, which shows how the class will be represented. The Story Board’s design gives the ID a breakdown of what the class will need to have in order for the students to learn. In the design process the Story Board will represent categories for the objectives to fit into. Writing the objectives and goals for the course will give the ID a direction of where the training is going, how it will instruct the students, and then evaluate how well the student learned.    

This week, we were asked to evaluate an open source site and I have chosen to evaluate MIT’s open course materials found at http://ocw.mit.edu/index.htm.  When looking at the site as a whole, the overall design is appealing and interesting. The graphics are appealing and visible and are relevant to the topics presented. The text and other basic layouts of the site seems to be purposefully thought out with a “Get Started with OCW” (MIT, 2011) video that gives a general overview of the course and other aspects of the course the learner will need to know.

When choosing a course, the learning appears to be fully asynchronous and relevant to a distance learning environment.  The heading for a course on Computer Science immediately has a layout of Course Features, which include: Video lectures, Assignments, Subtitles/Transcript and Exams and solutions. There is also a technical requirement heading which gives the user a heads up on the type of software he/she needs to have access to in order to view certain files.

Now lets consider the recommendations for online instruction for this website. Some of the online recommendations in our text show the following requirements.

Unit, Module Topic Guidelines where the Unit would be shown as relating to “4 or 5 weeks of instruction” (Simonson et al, 2009, p.155), a Module or a “distinct and discreet component of a unit” (Simonson et al, 2009, p.155), or a Topic “supporting the idea that explains, clarifies, or supports a module” (Simonson et al, 2009, p.156).

In the MIT site, the syllabus and assignment lists are patterned out in an ordered fashion with Unit goals, Modules, and Topics being correctly separated.  When thinking of the design elements the course the activities section is broken down by lectures and is relevant to the lecture topic. The learner is presented with and encouraged to use many collaborative opportunities with his/her fellow classmates. Moving on to the evaluation guidelines, this course exhibits a “major assignment, and one minor assignment per two to three modules” (Simonson et al, 2009, p.156).  The assessment does not follow all of the patterns set forth in our text such as the lack of a “Ten-page paper” (Simonson et al. 2009, p.156) and additional graded threads but I believe that it does produce clearly stated learning objectives with “observable and measurable learning outcomes” (Simonson et al. 2009, p.156). 

The content is clearly stated as per our text and there are specific reading and lecture subheadings for each topic. The last concept in our text discusses the teaching guidelines. The course is presented as having two one hour per week sessions along with a recitation one time per week.

In looking at overall design and concept of the course, I believe that the MIT site follows many of the recommendations for “Distance Delivered Instruction” (Simonson et al, 2009, p.155). The course looks appealing and carefully thought out, the modules are easy to follow and the flow of the layout is carefully chosen. This site would certainly be a welcome addition to the online distance learner and gives a rich learning environment, which is both interesting and incorporates usable information in an appealing and well thought out design.

Resources:

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

MIT(2002-2011) MIT open courseware: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Retrieved from: http://ocw.mit.edu/index.htm