According to its own mission statement, Open Culture is not a distance learning enterprise, so much as a curator of the wealth of information and materials available online. In the “About Us” section of the Open Culture web site (http://www.openculture.com/faq), Open Culture describes itself this way:
“Web 2.0 has given us great amounts of intelligent audio and video. It’s all free. It’s all enriching. But it’s also scattered across the web, and not easy to find. Our whole mission is to centralize this content, curate it, and give you access to this high quality content whenever and wherever you want it.”
The result is a wealth of free media, in the form of movies, podcasts, audio books and recorded course lectures from some of the country’s most prestigious universities. There is an incredible amount to hear and see here, with media on hundreds of topics.
Open Culture offers over 250 free online courses, with materials downloadable to the learner’s home computer or mp3 player. Again, the sheer amount of media is amazing, but I think it is misleading to call this distance learning. I would call it an exceptionally comprehensive source of distance learning material.
I found many interesting offerings in Open Culture’s online courses. One was a course called Listening to Music, which featured an entire semester of lectures by Yale’s Professor Craig Wright (http://oyc.yale.edu/music/listening-to-music/content/downloads). Each 50-minute lecture is available as a downloadable video podcast. The course text is available as a free, downloadable PDF file. Even as a face-to-face lesson, there is not a lot for the learner to do except to listen and take notes. Occasionally the instructor asks a question. Unfortunately, at a distance, we are not able to see the responder, nor can we hear the response.
For the distance learner, there is no opportunity for the kinds of interaction that help a learner to make meaning out of material (Piskurich, 2010) The learner cannot interact with the material, the instructor, or the other learners. There is no opportunity for discussion, nor any for collaboration. The assessments given to the students present at the face-to-face lectures are not provided for the distance learner, so there is no opportunity to evaluate the level of learning.
I was surprised and pleased to learn that Open Culture’s creators are open to the use and manipulation of their materials. The music class from Yale includes information about the Creative Commons’ Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 license, which permits the “free use or re-purposing of the Open Yale Courses material by others.” (Open Yale Courses, 2011) This opens the door for instructors or instructional designers to make use of these excellent media resources in the creation of quality distance learning.
Simonson, Smaldino, Albright, and Zvacek (2009) describe a design team approach to instructional design, in which an instructional designer, along with a subject matter expert, a media specialist, and an instructor work together to create effective instruction. Open Culture is a great source of media, which the team could consider as they design and develop the instruction.
Once in awhile I have encountered teachers who treat the teacher’s manual or text book as if it is a comprehensive course all on its own. I would argue that the text book, like the Open Culture’s media offerings, is only a resource, and cannot substitute for sound instructional design.
References
Open Culture 2011 Open culture: the best free cultural and educational media on the webOpen Culture (2011). Open culture: the best free cultural and educational media on the web. Retrieved February 2, 2011, from http://openculture.com
Piskurich, G. (2010). Planning and developing online courses [Video podcast].Laureate, Inc
Simonson M Smaldino S Albright M Zvacek S 2009 Teacing and learning at a distanceSimonson, M., Smaldino, S., Albright, M., & Zvacek, S. (2009). Teaching and learning at a distance (4th Ed.). : Allyn & Bacon / Pearson.
