Free or Not, Are All Online Learning Experiences Created Equal?

This week, I was asked to evaluate a free, online course and determine whether the course appeared to be carefully pre-planned and designed for a distance learning environment. While during this program I have looked at other online course, in light of the upcoming elections and the saturation of political ads in which music, both patriotic and other genres, is often used in the background, I was drawn to the course titled “Politics in Music” designed by Courtney Brown, found at the following URL: http://www.courtneybrown.com/classes/podcasts.html

When designing an online learning experience, whether it be a synchronous or asynchronous course, it is recommended the facilitator considers the general ability and learning styles of the learning audience (Simonson et al., 2012). Upon the initial viewing of the course, I was immediately overwhelmed. Perhaps this is because during my experience with Walden University, I have experienced a very clean, well-organized online classroom through the use of BlackBoard and another CMS, and as a learner, we bring with us our prior learning experiences that will in some way impact other learning experiences (Simonson et al., 2012). In these experiences, the materials for the online course have been organized into weekly topics, making navigation through the information relatively easy for the learner. While the side menu bar for this particular course was clearly labeled, it was not focused on the learning topic. In fact, the page displayed not only resources for the above-named course, but for other courses the professor taught as well. It also was unclear as to whether the course was truly an online course, a hybrid course, or a blended course. Yet, clear directions were given as to how to access the PodCasts, which were being used to presented the course materials, and the topics were organized in a fashion ranging from earliest musical forms to the most recent, the topics seemed more to have been “dumped” onto the “course page” for the learner to sift through at their convenience. There were some links that helped a new online learner, and eventually through the links on the side menu bar, I was able to find a course syllabus. Despite these pieces of the puzzle, it is my overall opinion the course was designed more for a traditional classroom learner, or perhaps a hybrid-learning experience, and not as a true online distance learning experience that considered the learner as well as their learning styles.

While distance learning requires the learner to take as much, if not more, responsibility in the learning process as the instructor, it shouldn’t be a mapless treasure hunt that has the potential to lead the learner in circles. Constructing a meaningful learning experience, whether it be in the traditional classroom or an online environment, takes time, planning, and careful execution to ensure that learning occurs without frustration, and while there is truth to the old saying, “you get what you pay for,” in terms of education, it is my opinion that whether it be a free online course or one that access is granted to on the basis of payment, if the layout of the course fails to lend itself to the learning objectives, both the learner and instructor will fail.

References:

Simonson, M., Smaldino, S., Albright, M., & Zvacek, S. (2012). Teaching and learning at a distance: Foundations of distance education (5th ed.) Boston, MA: Pearson.