Distance learning provides a unique education outlet that opens up learning opportunities for many students that otherwise could not access education due to various constraints. As distance learning grows, it continues to make education more accessible, as seen with the current trend of Open Course websites. Open Courses offer a way to participate in distance learning for no price (Simonson, Smaldino, Albright, & Zvacek, 2012). Often, prestigious universities and institutions offer and manage these free courses and some even come with institutional credit or certifications. Coursera is one such site that offers Open Courses. Coursera manages various types of distance learning offerings from universities such as Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This site boasts it helps students master knowledge through courses utilizing solid pedagogical design and interactive learning methodologies (Coursera, 2013). This blog addresses one of those courses, called “E-Learning and Digital Cultures” (Knox, Bayne, Macleod, Ross, & Sinclair, 2013).
Course URL: https://www.coursera.org/course/edc
Planning and Design
The course, originally offered through the University of Edinburgh, explores how the digital age and learning cultures interact. In a five-week timeframe, students learn about digital teaching and learning practices and digital influences on culture and education. It appears the planning and design of the course is thorough, as the description claims five experts in instructional design and distance education, who run the eLearning Program at the University of Edinburgh, created the course. The course has video lectures, readings, and collaborative discussion boards associated with each week, as well as a final course project. This breadth of learning methodologies and media suggests careful planning went into preparing the course. The instructors seem to have also considered the needs of their learners, as they have integrated multiple styles of teaching to appeal to various learning styles, and have also structured the course in a very open format, using simple applications such as YouTube.
Online Instruction Recommendations
Not only does the course appear to be well planned, but it also factors in many distance learning design recommendations and best practices. First, they appeal to the recommendation that many forms of visual media should be used verses simple text reading, as they employ videos and narrated lectures (Simonson et al., 2012). Second, to appeal to Foley’s (2003) recommendations, they vary the teaching and learning strategies used and offer an experiential learning opportunity in the form of the culminating activity. Finally, the course offers many opportunities for participation and collaboration, which is a critical element of a successful distance learning experience, as Bates (in Simonson et al., 2012) expresses in his 12 golden rules for distance learning.
Course Activities and Active Learning
Based on the course description, it appears the course will have much interactivity, both instructor to student and student to student. The first interactive method used is what the instructors call a “film festival”, where students view several short video clips of classic movies during one of the first lectures and collaborate in discussion boards about the movies’ references to a digital culture. Considering that all of the course lectures are delivered through video as well, it seems the designers are embracing the concept that visual stimuli are an essential feature of distance learning since the instructor and students are separated (Simonson et al., 2012).
In addition to videos and discussion boards, the instructors ask students to post their course work to shared documents sites to obtain feedback from their peers, which further encourages collaboration in the course. The culminating activity for the course, a “visual artifact”, asks the students to create a graphic, picture, or short film to represent the themes they have learned and post that to a shared space for discussion. This activity is both active learning and interactive, while also tapping into higher order thinking methodologies, as it asks for evaluation and synthesis of course content (Forehand, 2005). Overall, the course seems to have elements of careful planning and sound design, which would appear to lead to a meaningful educational outcome.
References
Foley, M. (2003). The global development learning network: A world bank initiative in distance learning for development. In M. Moore & W. Anderson (Eds.), The handbook of distance education. Mahwah, NJ: Laurence Erlbaum Associates.
Forehand, M. (2005). Bloom’s taxonomy: Original and revised. In M. Orey (Ed.), Emerging perspectives on learning, teaching, and technology. Retrieved from http://projects.coe.uga.edu/epltt/
Knox, J., Bayne, S., Macleod, H., Ross, J., & Sinclair, C. (2013). E-learning and digital cultures. (The University of Edinburgh) Retrieved from https://www.coursera.org/course/edc
Simonson, M., Smaldino, S., Albright, M., & Zvacek, S. (2012). Teaching and learning at a distance. (5th ed.). Boston, MA: Pearson.
Instructional Design & Technology: Ringer 