URL: https://www.extension.harvard.edu/open-learning-initiative/sets-counting-probability
Course Name: Sets, Counting, and Probability
Open courses are considered to courses that are provided to people for free for the sake of learning. These courses do not earn an individual a certificate or degree.
When looking at this week’s resource suggestions for Open Course offerings, I knew right away that I wanted to look into what Harvard had to offer for their Open Course offerings. I wanted to see how much time, effort, and distance learning principles they put into the development of these courses. Sadly, I was rather disappointed when I reviewed the several courses they offered. Each course had a similar set-up but differed slightly in the area of materials.
The course I selected, ‘Sets, Counting, and Probability’ did not use a course management system, but just a simple webpage on the Harvard Extension School website. It is unfortunate because the CMS would have been an effective way to “provide learning resources and conduct course-related activities” (Simonson, Smaldino, Albright, & Zvacek, 2012, p.183). The page began by instructing the learners regarding what skills they would develop in this course, which were that the online “math course develops the mathematics needed to formulate and analyze probability models for idealized situations drawn from everyday life” (Sets, Counting, and Probability, n.d). It also informed the learners regarding the topics that would be covered in the course. Further down, it broke down the course by topic and had subsets for each topic. The subset included the video and audio files, which were 2 hour long recorded lectures (straight from the traditional classroom setting, which took hours to download that size of file) and the class materials. The class materials consisted of generic documents from 2005 that vaguely discussed the topic and a problem set assignment worksheet. This was consistent for the remainder of the topics.
For the questions asked for this assignment, which were:
1. Does the course appear to be carefully pre-planned and designed for a distance learning environment? How so?
2. Does the course follow the recommendations for online instruction as listed in your course textbook?
3. Did the course designer implement course activities that maximize active learning for the students?
The answers to all three of those questions, unfortunately is no. The course was directly taken from the traditional course set-up and inserted into the “online course,” which is one of the major no-no’s of planning a distance learning course. This is the case because one of the fundamentals of teaching online is to “avoid dumping a face-to-face course onto the web” (Simonson, Smaldino, Albright, & Zvacek, 2012, p.134) because “online activities for students should have specific pedagogical or course management purposes” (Simonson, Smaldino, Albright, & Zvacek, 2012, p.134). This course did not base its offerings on theory, nor did it provide interactive discussions or group work to maximize the learning for students. The material was in the same format each week and didn’t provide any variety to meet the needs of the wide array of users that would be accessing this free course. Because this course is free, I would suggest the course materials were designed and scaffolded to meet the needs of a very wide range of people.
References
Sets, Counting, and Probability. (n.d). Retrieved from https://www.extension.harvard.edu/open-
learning-initiative/sets-counting-probability
Simonson, M., Smaldino, S., Albright, M., & Zvacek, S. (2012). Teaching and learning at a
distance: Foundations of distance education (5th ed.) Boston, MA: Pearson