About the Course
This course is expected to foster the development of aural skills that would lead to an understanding of Western music. The learner is introduced to ways how music is composed and is further taught how to listen to a wide variety of musical styles, from Bach and Mozart, to Gregorian chant, to the blues.
Analysis
This open course offered by Professor Wright is adopted from his traditional class format and posted on the college website as a free open class. The course has several advantages. It is readily available to anyone who has access to the internet and has a working computer. The course is available 24/7 and anyone interested in the course can participate at anyplace, anytime. The learners can take the course at their own pace as they complete the different chapters. The technology required for the course is easy to use and one does not require any advance technical knowhow.
Does
the course appear to be carefully pre-planned and designed for a distance-learning
environment?
This course appears to have been initially designed and planned to run as a traditional class with an active audience and an instructor delivering a lecture. Simonson, Smaldino, Albright, and Zvacek (2009) suggest that it is important to retool traditional face-to-face class if you are to offer it as a distance program. This course is a basic video recording of the instructor as he provides lectures to his class. The materials have been thereafter been posted online without any consideration how the distant learner will use it. This course would probably work well as a distributed learning where learners who may need to review what they learned in class can do reruns of what was lectured in class.
Recommendation for online instruction;
This course needed to be retooled from an F2F course to a distance learning class. The approach must shift from teacher centered to learner centered. Learner centered approach discourages students from sitting back and being passive learners. The course would have identified tools and strategies to create interaction among students and between students and the instructor. There needed to be an active communication within the instructional setting. On of this strategy would have been the use of threaded discussion that enhances communication with other learners and the instructor.
Facilitating Active learning
Simonson et al (2009) states that lack of active participation for learners is distance learning ‘kiss of death’. To encourage student’s participation and active learning, the instructor and designer would need to provide students with opportunities to think about a topic, create group discussions and implement activities that would include hands on experience with materials. Some other approaches would include analysis of case studies, structured discussions or virtue field trips. The goal would be to keep learners involved in own learning.
I found no discernible effort to encourage interactivity necessary for distance learners in the analyzed course. What I found was what Schlosser and Anderson as cited in Simonson et al (2009) referred to as ‘talking heads’ . “Talking heads” are the least successful strategy to use in distance learning. In this course, the instructor is the center of instruction and the students plays a relatively passive role
In conclusion, I would aver that the open course above does not appear to be carefully pre-planned and designed for a distance-learning environment. It also does not follow the recommendations for online instruction as listed in by Simonson et al (2009). Neither does the instructional designer implement course activities that maximize active learning for the students.
References
Simonson, M., Smaldino, S., Albright, M., & Zvacek, S. (2009). Teaching And Learning at a Distance: Foundations of Distance education (Fourth ed.). New York: Pearson Inc.
No comments:
Post a Comment