Week 5 The Impact of Open Source

The Impact of Open Source

Human Happiness – PSYCH 156 UC Berkeley

The Open source class that I chose was found on www.openculture.com/freeonlineresources, and viewed on iTunes at the following site http://itunes.apple.com/itunes-u/psychology-156-fall-2008-uc/id354824220?mt=2 .

It is taken from the Psychology Department at UC Berkeley.  This course is downloaded via iTunes and is a series of lectures.  The course was recorded in 2008 and definitely lacks the technology available today. 

When looking and listening to the course itself it is very evident that there has been much preplanning and planning to create the course.  There is a clear syllabus explained by the Instructor.  All course objectives seem to be clearly stated and the Instructor explained all required elements that are included in the course. The course is designed as a lecture series for the classroom setting. It is not initially designed to be a distance course.  You can hear the instructor lecturing to the students in the course.  There are times when he introduces another speaker that is not micro phoned properly and you cannot hear them.

Because this course was established as a lecture course it does not meet the guidelines for online learning.  There is one module (lecture) per week. The instructor does not mention any email, chat or discussion group options which would be crucial in online learning.  The assignments are clearly stated in the syllabus, yet not available to the listener. The discussion questions that are presented are in the lecture format and open to the class listening, yet no effective for the online learner. There would finally be no progress reports given to the listener or any feedback in general. (Simonsen, Smaldino, ALbright, Zvacek, 2012).

 The students participating in the face to face are getting the full feedback and experience in the classroom which is not available to the online listener.

The activities in the course are not available to the online listener, even though they are discussed in the lectures.  When listening to the course content it could easily lend itself to the online learning format. The lectures could be broken down into shorter lectures (listening exercises) included with discussion forums, activities and assessments. I found the content to be very fun to listen to and brought humor to the classroom.

Currently the course is not conducive to true online learning, but with a few tweaks it could be a great online course.

Resources
www.openculture.com/freeonlineresources, and viewed on iTunes at the following site http://itunes.apple.com/itunes-u/psychology-156-fall-2008-uc/id354824220?mt=2 .

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