The Impact of Open Course

I did a review of an Open Course that is offered through Stanford University. It is called Technology and Entrepreneurship and can be found at http://e145.stanford.edu/.

 Does the course appear to be carefully pre-planned and designed for a distance learning environment? How so?

 This course is extremely organized and appeared to be pre-planned as evidenced by the outline of the course (i.e. gave a thorough overview with links to videos) and a succession of topics, ending with a summary. Study questions, recommended readings, and resources are listed throughout the course. My only criticism is the lack of interesting graphics. I found it to be very boring with the exception of the links to the videos. While the aesthetics were pleasing, there was very little interesting pictures or graphics otherwise.

Does the course follow the recommendations for online instruction as listed in your course textbook?

There are several recommendations that the textbook Teaching and Learning at a Distance: Foundations of Distance Education (Simonson, Smaldino, Albright and Zvacek, 2012) provides. This course seemed to follow many of those recommendations. For example, the instructor references why certain majors should study entrepreneurship (addressing the target audience). The instructor did a great job highlighting what content was going to be delivered, as well as the desired outcomes (p. 173). The course was very carefully designed as evidenced by the amount of time spent outlining what was going to be presented, and discussing what should be learned by taking the course. The medium chosen is accessible to any student that has access to the Internet and the instructor uses a lot of links to www.youtube.com. The instructor also did a good job of outlining why the content was relevant to the needs of the learners.

 Did the course designer implement course activities that maximize active learning for the students?

 The instructor was very consistent in having learners complete study questions that engaged the learners in the material that was being presented and forced them to work with their teammates to complete assignments.

Summary

Until now, I had never heard of “OpenCourse” . I was impressed by ability to access a well-designed course from a highly reputable university. While the objective of these courses is to gain knowledge about the topic being presented, it opened my eyes to the fact that I could see how instruction has been designed from these highly reputable universities. This will give me another avenue of learning how to design effective distance education.


Simonson, M., Smaldino, S., Albright, M., & Zvacek, S. (2012). Teaching and learning at a

      distance: Foundations of distance education (5th ed.). Boston: Pearson.