Revew: Open Courses from Coursera

Vaccines: An Open Course from Coursera

A relatively new trend in distance learning involves free courses available online for anyone, not just those enrolled in college programs. These “open courses” are for students who wish to expand their knowledge base without committing to (or paying for) a university program. Kikkas, Laanpere, and Poldoja (2011) claim that an open course “facilitates a more flexible and also more challenging model of learning.”  It’s an innovative approach to education that has important implications to the future of the field: “Organizations like Coursera are part of a push that could alter the way we learn forever. Education is easily one of the most important things in the world, and now there are countless ways and places to learn outside of the university” (Weber, 2012).

Earlier this summer, I enrolled in a Vaccines course through Coursera. Coursera is a “social entrepreneurship company  that partners with the top universities in the world to offer courses online for anyone to take, for free” (Coursera.org).  The company partners with several universities, including Stanford, Princeton, University of Michigan, and University of Pennsylvania, along with 12 new partnering universities announced in mid-July.  

Coursera differs a bit from other open courses I researched in that you must sign up for a (free) account and actually enroll in the course, rather than just watching video lectures online. Coursera is set up in an LMS with many of the same attributes as college courses I’ve taken.  The courses are asynchronous, but they include a real-time schedule and class/teacher interactions similar to my college courses at Walden.

Due to a busier-than-expected summer, I did not complete the Vaccines course in which I enrolled. However, I did review the course material in detail, and I was very impressed. In this class, the material is clearly organized with a syllabus and weekly instructions and a “course how-to.”  The instruction is divided into video lectures, discussion forums, and assessments (in the form of quizzes). Lectures  are 10-15 minutes in length and focus on a single concept. The lectures are professionally created with a video of the instructor accompanied by visuals. The quizzes are short multiple-choice quizzes that are auto-graded, and they give students instant feedback on their understanding of the material.  Finally, students collaborate in the discussion boards to help them understand the material in more depth.

According to Simonson et. al (2012), “distance learning programs are most effective when they include careful planning and consistency among courses.” It looks to me as if this course was designed with a clear purpose and a careful analysis of the goals, audience, and stakeholders.  It was definitely designed for online learners. It seems, from reading the discussion posts, that some students were unhappy with a few bugs in the course and the low level of instructor interaction, but otherwise the reviews were excellent.  Coursera’s materials indicate their commitment to using Mastery Learning principles, and this course seems to be an effective example of this. I think the only way it could encourage more active learning would be if there were group projects involved, but in a voluntary asynchronous course, this would be extremely difficult to implement.  I’m not sure about the consistency among courses, because they offer courses from a variety of instructors and universities, so I’m looking forward to my next Coursera class, which starts in a few weeks, to find out whether the expectations and course arrangement are similar.

All in all, I was very impressed with Coursera. It seems to be an excellent way for students around the world to take advantage of excellent instructional materials at no cost.

References

Coursera.org. (n.d.) About Coursera. Retrieved from https://www.coursera.org/#about.

Kikkas, K., Laanpere, M., & Põldoja, H. (2011). Open Courses: The Next big Thing in eLearning?. Proceedings Of The European Conference On E-Learning, 371-377.

Simonson, M., Smaldino, S., Albright, M., & Zvacek, S. (2012). Teaching and learning at a distance: Foundations of distance education (5th ed.) Boston, MA: Pearson.

Weber, Harrison. (2012). Education startup Coursera partners with 12 new universities, raises $3.7M and hits 1.6M enrollments. TNW Insider. Retrieved from http://thenextweb.com/insider/2012/07/17/education-startup-coursera-partners-with-12-new-universities-raises-3-7m-and-hits-1-5m-students/

Distance Learning Technologies: Virtual Field Trips

Field trips – piling on to a yellow school bus, sitting not-so-quietly for the trip, wandering throughout a museum with a group of friends, eating lunch from a brown paper sack – have become increasingly rare in today’s public education. Often the funds just don’t exist for this type of experience (Lind 2009). In addition, teachers are under increasing pressure to spend as much time as possible on the skills that students will have to master for state tests, rather than “wasting” a day at a museum.  In order to bridge the gap for students who don’t get the opportunity for field trips, some teachers are turning to virtual tours instead (Zaino 2009).

Imagine hearing about two new exhibits at New York City museums that would be absolutely perfect to supplement the curriculum in the high school history course you teach. You want your students to tour the museums, interact with the curators, and participate in a group critique of a few pieces of artwork from each exhibit.

The problem?  You’re located on the west coast. What do you do? Perhaps asking students to front part of the costs would work, as would fundraisers or seeking donations from local businesses, but all of these are very time consuming, Besides, you’re not sure how many parents would let their children travel cross-country with a school group, and you want ALL of your students to experience these exhibits. Enter virtual field trips. By using web 2.0 tools like Skype, discussion boards, and media sharing sites, students can participate in rich learning experiences from their classrooms (Zaino 2009). According to Simonson et. al (2012), the cone of experience helps educators to choose the type of distance learning activity that is most effective to the circumstances: “The critical job of the educator, especially the designer of distance education materials, is to be only as realistic as needed in order for learning to effectively occur” (pg 92). In this case, an actual field trip would be an inefficient use of funds and time, while a virtual trip gives students a realistic experience of a museum visit while cutting back drastically on the cost and travel considerations involved.

In this scenario, I would suggest a combination of distance learning tools. I would start by looking for a virtual tour offered online by the museum – many prominent organizations already offer these on their websites. For example, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum  has an extensive collection of online exhibit resources, with even MORE available online than you’d see in the museum. The National Gallery of Art offers online tours of exhibits as well as what they call “in-depth study tours,” or guided virtual tours of specific artists or themes.

Screenshot of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History's virtual tour

In addition to the virtual tour, I would suggest a webconferencing  tool like Skype to connect students with a museum curator. Skype is easy to use, free of cost, and requires little in the way of special equipment (just a webcam and a high speed internet connection). Finally, in order for students to work on a group critique of  a few selected exhibit pieces, a discussion forum with capability for embedded graphics would be effective. Forums.com is an easy to use example, and many course management tools (like Moodle, for example) include discussion forums as well.

Virtual field trips have been used successfully in classrooms around the world. According to Spicer and Stratford (2001), students have very positive perceptions of virtual field trips (although students are still insistent that they should not completely replace real field trips). One science teacher at a New Jersey middle school received a local education foundation grant in order to set up a series of virtual field trips for students at her school – they’ve “measured elevations of topographical features on the moon, dissected a cow’s eye via a link to the Hands-On Museum in Ann Arbor, MI., and took a virtual tour of the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, NY” (Manzo, 2009). Other teachers have used virtual field trips to prepare for and supplement an actual trip: one elementary classroom in Alabama met virtually with a scientist at NASA’s Mississippi Space Center, and they “studied features of space crafts and the solar system as they prepared for an actual visit to NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, AL, later this year” (Manzo, 2009).

References

Lind, G.  2009. Cash-strapped schools cancel field trips. USA Today.

Manzo, K. (2009). Virtual Field Trips Open Doors for Multimedia Lessons. Education Week, 28(21), 9.

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

      distance education (5th ed.) Boston, MA:Pearson.

Spicer, J. I., & Stratford, J. J. (2001). Student perceptions of a virtual field trip to replace a real field trip. Journal Of  

      Computer Assisted Learning, 17(4), 345-354.

Zaino, J. (2009). Field-Tripping Goes Virtual. Instructor, 119(2), 34-36.