It is interesting that in a world of K-12 standardized testing that is dumbing down our youths' natural curiosity, higher education institutions are offering learning to the public for the simple pleasure of learning. Is just offering content the same as providing an education though? This is the crux of the matter in terms of instructional design, and it is no small question to ask. The idea that teaching is something that requires little skill or preparation is an old idea, as Bernard Shaw tried to point out in 1903, yet even in a digital age there is more to learning than simply being shown content. So what is the validity of the design of courses being offered through iTunesU and the like for free online?
To answer this question I looked at some of the courses offered by Stanford University through iTunesU. Specifically, I looked at a course on Virgil's Aeneid. The content of the course is very good if one strictly looks at the information being presented. The professor is well informed and provides a lot of information on the topic in a series of five segments. It is important to note that the information contained in the class was not the item I was looking at though; I was looking to see if this course offered high quality instructional design of the kind that Simonson, Smaldino, Albright, and Zvacek (2009) describe.
Unfortunately, on that account, the course failed. While the average user now has access to the information about the Aeneid and though the information was presented by a scholar, the course itself was little more than a lecture recorded in a face-to-face setting. In this sense, this was not a course at all but rather the equivalent of a recorded book online. Without any visuals to help the learner, without interactivity, without feedback, and without assessments, all items referenced by Simonson et. al (2009), it is difficult to see how this is actually an online course. There are no outside references to additional resources and there is not even a link provided to the actual work being discussed...even though a five second search on Google showed that the Aeneid is available for free from the Gutenberg project.
While a quick search on the Internet can turn up any number of assignments for this work of literature (storyboards, summer reading, etc.) none are provided from the actual institution offering the course. It is hard to see how offering a simple set of five two hour lectures is good instructional design. In addition to the glaring issues of this course, providing the information in a block of two hours is itself questionable. As Dills and Hernandez (2008) explain, classes that meet more often provide better results for student learning. While the length of the online offering may be somewhat mitigated by the fact that students can pause, rewind and fast-forward through the lecture, I would postulate that by structuring the course in two hour segments the ability of students to interact with the content is limited by the design of the lecture.
Even, Kupczynski, Ice, Wiesenmayer and McCluskey (2010) who point out that direct instruction can be an important educational tool in distance learning do not discount the active role of feedback and interaction with the instructor in the learning processes of students. With many of the Stanford courses, and indeed many of the other online "courses" offered in iTunesU, all you are really getting is content delivery of face to face lectures. A lecture does not included any interactivity for the learner and therefore he/she becomes a passive party in the room. While this can happen in a regular classroom, the student on a roster is still able to interact with the instructor in meaningful ways if he or she desires to. With the lecture based offerings on iTunesU the learner is only able to get out of the class what they are able to figure out and understand on their own. I wonder if this kind of course offering will lead to a misinformed populace over time as people who think they are capable of understanding scholarly approaches to topics are partaking of the offering and then redistributing their own understanding of the information on the Internet as stated facts.
In any case, higher education institutions providing content for the general population for free is a very exciting prospect. I hope that over time the content will be provided using sound instructional design principles in addition to the direct instruction that is currently being found online. I have faith that as technology use and capabilities expand we will see additional models of information become available online and as more instructional designers become skilled in multiple aspects of the process of instructional design, more media rich modules will find their way onto the screens of learners. I hope that over time the decision to support curiosity will eventually lead the general population into support of learning for learning's sake in our public schools because then we might get to the point where students could produce meaningful content for the masses. Imagine a world where students were taught to produce high quality content for others; they would be learning to be critical of both the content and format of online instruction and it just might help make a general population qualified to utilize and improve a resource like the iTunesU of today.
References:
Dills, A. K., & Hernandez-Julian, R. (2008). Course Scheduling and Academic Performance. Economics of Education Review, 27(6), 646-654. Retrieved from EBSCOhost.
Kupczynski, L., Ice, P., Wiesenmayer, R., & McCluskey, F. (2010). Student Perceptions of the Relationship between Indicators of Teaching Presence and Success in Online Courses. Journal of Interactive Online Learning, 9(1), 23-43. Retrieved from EBSCOhost.
Simonson, M., Smaldino, S., Albright, M., & Zvacek, S. (2009). Teaching and learning at a distance: Foundations of distance education (4th ed.) Boston, MA: Pearson.
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