In the MIT Online session provided above you will find the class for Linear Algebra. This course, as with many online courses from established universities, is presented online for the learner to expand their knowledge. These free online courses are not for credit, you cannot use this course to gain a degree from the institution and it is simply another way to access information. The main part of the sample from MIT is laid out like any class you would take either in a traditional classroom or online. There is a syllabus, a course description, course format, course overview, goals and prerequisites. This course also offers other suggested sources of information such as a textbook and introductions to the instructor and TAs; there are even credits for the videographers and writers. As you proceed through the screens the way this course differs from a traditional classroom setting is that there are links to view the lecture and/or the transcript of the lecture. These links are a page design set for self-paced study by the online learner (Simonson, Smaldino, Albright, & Zvacek., 2012).
This online class demonstrates definite pre-planning because unlike traditional courses there are documents you can use to check your progress in the class. Another item that shows pre-planning has happened is where the links for the sessions are posted on the screen, the length of time for the hyperlinks is shown in parentheses. On the downside and this is probably because the course is an audit type course; however there is no interaction of any kind. There are no blog sites, posting sites, no way for learners to interact. In a true online course for actual credit or as a step in a degree program these posting sites are available. It is understandable that an audit course would not provide posting sites, however it does not mean that people interested in this class could not try and create their own posting site. Anyone can make a blog site these days - the hardest part would be to have others that might be auditing the course to join in on the blog - or even find it.
Yale Online Chemistry Instruction
Another site I reviewed is the Yale Online courses area, specifically Chemistry. I was interested in this area because my daughter is a graduate student in the Chemistry department at Yale University. I was interested to see what a university of the caliber of Yale would put out as an online course. As with the MIT sample above, the free online courses in the Yale site are not for credit, these classes cannot be used to gain a degree from the university. I was not impressed with the online class. There were no indications that the classes were designed for the web. Basically the classes were just videos of the instructor giving his lecture to his class. Unlike the MIT page, there was a syllabus for the class through a link on the left side menu, however when selecting the link the syllabus was somewhat vague and too high level. The only way I found any classes (or lectures in this case) was to start clicking on links and see what the next page would give me. I eventually found the classes for the beginning chemistry classes by sheer luck. Once on the page with the links to the classes and eventually selecting one of the classes all that was on the page was an overview and links to the video of the classroom lecture. There is a link for the HTML version of the script which I suppose is something but nothing significant enough to say this is a online course. The only other item that would be online about the class is that the video can be paused, replayed or fast forwarded - in other words self-paced. It leads me to believe that Yale feels the pressure to offer online courses but it is an afterthought and nothing that they will put much work into since they probably feel that Yale is a prestigious university where the knowledge should be held within its walls.
The big difference here is that Yale is an old established university first opened back in 1701 and MIT is by definition a technical college. I would expect MIT to have a well-developed online course structure and that they would have a well-developed online degree program in many areas of study.
McBride, M. (2008) Freshman Organic Chemistry. (Yale University: Open Yale Courses), http://oyc.yale.edu/chemistry/freshman-organic-chemistry/ (Accessed 05 Feb, 2012). License: Creative Commons BY-NC-SA
Simonson, M., Smaldino, S., Albright, M., & Zvacek, S. (2012). Teaching and learning at a distance: Foundations of distance education (5th ed.) Boston, MA: Pearson.
Strang, G. 18.06SC Linear Algebra, Fall 2011. (Massachusetts Institute of Technology: MIT OpenCourseWare), http://ocw.mit.edu (Accessed 05 Feb, 2012). License: Creative Commons BY-NC-SA
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