|
Edited on Mon Jan-26-09 06:36 PM by mike_c
...and pay forward by making the online components of my courses open for guest access-- my university does not publish open courseware in the strict sense, so the best I can do is just take off the access restrictions.
Interestingly, the MIT open courseware site (which has mixed quality, IMO, at least in biology) focuses largely on large format lectures from previous years while at least some departments at MIT have abandoned those as poor practices in favor of extensive small-group collaborative learning (I believe the physics dept has done so across their entire curriculum). This is becoming increasingly common (and it should, IMO).
When MIT published their courses publicly, they said that they did so because they realized that the value of an MIT education was not the content of the courses, but the interaction with MIT professors inside and outside the classroom. That would seem to argue that the open courses are of limited educational value. Think of it this way-- there is a strong distance learning movement on campus these days, but nearly everyone recognizes that simply videoing lectures and posting them online with the course syllabus and assignments is not the best way to translate the educational experience from the classroom to the internet. Good distance learning course design focuses on other ways to obtain information and interact with classmates and teachers. Most open courseware I've seen does not meet those good distance learning standards yet.
On the other hand, they're better than nothing. Get the text and listen to the posted lectures, do the readings and so on-- you'll HAVE to learn something. You might learn a LOT-- if you invest the effort and are committed to doing more than just running your eyes over the words and letting the videos flicker in the background of your awareness. All learning occurs within your own nervous system in the end. It's just that there are some ways of getting information there that work better than others.
Also, note that learning CONTENT is only the lowest level of every taxomomy of learning that I'm aware of. Connecting learning to prior knowledge, learning to apply knowledge, learning critical thinking, collaborative skills, and so on are all equally important-- some of us argue that they're MORE important-- and they're all social activities to some degree or another. Good distance learning addresses that issue. There is no reason that Open Courseware should not, but much that I've seen does a mediocre job of supporting higher learning, at best.
|
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
