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/