The Impact of Open Source

I decided to use and expand on the Open Culture website, which was one of the examples in our resources as an Open Course website. I learned that Open Culture attempts to bring together high-quality cultural & educational media for the worldwide lifelong learning community. Open Culture’s whole mission is to centralize audio and video content, and give users access to this high quality content anytime they want it. It offers free audio books, free online courses, free movies, free language lessons, free ebooks and other enriching content, which in other Web 2.0 tools, were scattered across the web, and not easy to find. (Open Culture, 2010). With in the site I decided to expand on an introductory course in Greek history, which traced the development of Greek civilization as manifested in political, intellectual, and creative achievements from the Bronze Age to the end of the classical period. This Yale College course was taught on campus twice per week for 75minutes and was recorded for Open Yale Courses in the fall 2007. Here is a link to the course, http://oyc.yale.edu/classics/introduction-to-ancient-greek-history.

Does the course appear to be carefully pre-planned and designed for a distance learning environment? How so?
Yes, the course contents included an introduction about the Ancient Greek History course, the Professor Donald Kagan, and the structure of the course. It also included an online syllabus stating course objectives, policies, and requirements; class sessions with access to audio, video, and course materials; course downloads which included downloaded course pages and course media; and a survey that allows students to share their thoughts about the course.

Does the course follow the recommendations for online instruction as listed in your course textbook? As stated in our textbook, we must remember that open source software is intended to be freely shared and can be improved upon and redistributed to others. The code in which the software is written is free and available to anyone to do just about anything with it. Keeping that in mind, this online course definitely follows the idea of what Open Course Software really is.

Did the course designer implement course activities that maximize active learning for the students?
This particular course did not implement a lot of the course activities that usually maximizes active learning for distance learners, because it mainly focused on class lecture and self directed learning. In order to maximize active learning online other factors must exists such as class discussion and open forums, mentorship, projects, and collaborative learning.

References:
Open Culture (2010). Retrieved December 4, 2010 from, Website: http://www.openculture.com/

Simonson, M., Smaldino, S., Albright, M., & Zvacek, S. (2009). Teaching and learning at a distance: Foundations of distance education (4th ed.). Boston, MA: Pearson.