Tuesday 22 April 2014

Brief thoughts on some Open Educational Resources.

Part of this weeks activities we have been asked to look at a range of OpenEducational Resources and compare them, identifying some of their similarities and differences and what we think of them.

As I am studying with the Open University I thought I would start with the Open Learn Courses in the UK provided by the Open University through the website and also via iTunes U.
http://www.open.edu/itunes/

The course I chose to look at was the "Design Behind the Bike" I chose this primarily because I am interested in cycling and interested in the history of it's design.  The website itself is relatively easy to navigate and I didn't have too much of a problem finding what I wanted and being able to sample a video whilst on the Open Learn site I felt was an accessible way into the short course. 



Playing more in iTunes is a painless experience, assuming you have an iTunes account. One issue that I take is that whilst iTunes is free and available for Mac and PC and iOS it locks out quite a large proportion of people who use alternative operating systems and mobile platforms. 



Until iTunes becomes a web based application this problem is likely to prevail which in my opinion is a shame. The resource themselves were well paced, clear and well produced and accessible (in this instance) to a broad audience. I appreciated the transcripts being there and can imagine this being particularly useful for other more complicated subjects. However as with quite a few of the Open University transcripts, PDFs are problematic as the format doesn't allow you to easily annotate then. An aspect that was missing from the Open Learn course was the testing or checking to determine if you were actually learning. It was great to watch and passively absorb information but I would like to have seen some checking of learning. 

I spent a little time with the Codeacademy - Learn to code MOOC
Having previously dabbled with this site it was immediate accessible and I think it has struck the right level of formality to the website, clean light and fun. It also stays away from the geek cliche of coding which is a definite positive. 



The site give positive encouragement and makes use of badges and incentive for doing well and working your way through the problems. I feel that the testing and then 'levelling up' aspect will appeal to a broad audience. Plugging into social networks also is a way to show your friends how well you are doing. This reminds me of the John Seeley Brown lecture where he spoke comment about Michigan University not having 40000 students but 250000 as the wider networks that the learners are connected to also benefit from (albeit broader context). It's good to see that since I first visited code academy the amount of courses has grown and appear to be flourishing.