To be Open or Closed
By Hermes Sanchez
In our society, it seems that when items and programs are free, a certain value is placed. Open Course is a free resource that has been most individuals are unaware of. These courses are tool to improve learners’ knowledge. Many use these courses to coincide with their regular studies, to plug in holes or to get an awareness how other universities treat a matter (Simonson, 2009). Any students would strongly benefit from some more coordination and from some access to teaching beyond the pure material. One example of a good Open Course site is http://webcast.berkeley.edu.
They handle a wide arrange of courses that would benefit any student looking for quick refresher or updated their knowledge. They also have campus service for recording and publishing course and campus events for students and learners.
One aspect that grabs your attention is the educators’ involved in these courses. Its your list of the top scholars of each department. Their focus is primarily on leveraging technology to bring down the overall cost of production and distribution (Simonson, 2009). They have developed system automatically invites eligible faculty to participate each semester, manages their responses, create and schedule course recordings, and process and publish media files to Webcast Berkeley.
This clearly shows that Berkeley has carefully pre-planned and designed their courses more for a distance-learning environment. With majority of the courses in You-tube, most information is directly form the course itself with an institute course premise and outline that allows students to follow carefully and be able to build their knowledge base. This is a basis that seems to be growing and a fast rate as its development is setting new standards for open course learning objects.
The latest design that the schools are looking to enhance is the OpenCast Matterhorn Community.
Opencast Community is looking to launch a development project which is a collaboration between 13 partner institutions to develop and deliver an open-source automated lecture audio and video capture, processing, and distribution system. They will set a new precedence on the value of the open course that very well even go further than the original concept on the online community chat that can involve world wide talk which will open to everyone. Course designers have look in a way to fully maximize the course activities with interaction with students aboard and possible networking and knowledge base that will only benefit any learner who goes into this open course.
Open courses seems to be a big trend that many big universities are using to enhance their students, prepare them for their courses, and for what the future will be in distance learning. Berkeley has a good open course program that is beneficial to any learner or student who is looking to build the information tank and be able to tackle any additional courses to get that degree. Course developers have set good planned course material and gathered their top educators on video to give the student a complete interaction for the old school or classroom traditionalist but given a small sample how the distance learning will be a big force in the future. I would be “Open” than be closed when it comes to these courses.
Hermes Sanchez
Reference
Simonson, M., Smaldino, S., Albright, M., & Zvacek, S. (2009). Teaching and learning at a distance: Foundations of distance education (4th ed.) Boston, MA: Pear
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