A "brand name" doesn't always guarantee high quality!

I feel like the child who just discovered there is no real Santa Claus, rather only the spirit of Santa Claus! This feeling is a result of my exploration of an open course offered by THE Yale University. THE Yale University whose name echoed through my head as a high school student as my father hoped to send me to an Ivy League school. When this assignment was given to explore one of the free online courses available through them, I thought it would be the key to unlocking the mystique of what made Yale and all those other iconic institutions almost magical! Wow! If it turned out to be something special, I planned to explore their English offerings further after this course. I could almost see my father in heaven smiling, as I finally would attend the school he always dreamed of for me. Well, Dad, I hate to disappoint you again, but just as I told you when I dropped out of the big name university to attend Northern Illinois University, the name doesn’t promise quality in all areas, and this online course was an example of that!

I chose to explore a class that would be particularly relevant to my current teaching position: The American Novel since 1945 (http://oyc.yale.edu/english/american-novel-since-1945/content/downloads.html ). Upon first examination of the home page, I found the open courses available at Yale to meet my basic expectations. The philosophy and objectives were clearly laid out at the main text on the page and the departments offering courses were links on the left. Upon clicking on English, once again the department philosophy and objectives were listed at the top of the page, and I saw four offerings, each explained succinctly along and featuring a small picture of the professor. The navigation at this point was easy, and the general objectives of the course were clear.

However, as soon as I went to the page for the specific course, I knew I was in trouble. This course doesn’t meet any of the criteria that have been established in our readings or media presentations as to how a course should be set up! This is definitely NOT a distance education course. It is simply a filmed version of the face-to-face class! In addition, the filming was done in the actual classroom, and while the sound is excellent, the pacing of the teacher back and forth across the dirty chalkboard and the movement of the students were in the audience but caught in the filming frame drove me to distraction! Where were the activities? Where was the chance to explore ideas on my own? How could I relate to my fellow learners? Where was the technology? There was really no excuse for some of these things because this course was filmed in 2008. The technology and knowledge to create this course to be truly effective was available at that time!

There was no evidence that the ADDIE process was followed at all. There is little commendable that I can say about this course other than they do make the technology available in a multitude of ways, such as multiple audio and video file formats, so they did take into consideration what technology needs the learners might possess. However, that is the extent to which they addressed the needs of the distance learner. Even when I did go to download the files for the course, which were difficult to locate due to the multiple formats within the file folders, it took so long to download 250 mb at speed of 1.5 mb/second using my DSL line that I did exactly what Dr. George Piskurich warned about could happen in this week’s video; I multi-tasked as it was downloading and lost interest. In addition since I could have simply downloaded the lecture as an mp3, I could have skipped the video part altogether.

I can’t tell you how disappointed I am in this offering, which I’m sure is not much different than the other courses they are offering as Open Courses. Knowing that it’s Yale, I can’t believe that they totally ignored everything that makes an online course effective. As a matter of fact, I would like to compare this to an online course for which one pays to see the similarities and differences. I think instead that this was purely done as a public relations tool: “You, too, can attend Yale! See what our classes are like!” This is supported in the fact that there is very little financial expenditures associated with creating these types of classes. Someone just has to turn on the switch on the video camera and use a template for the courses and fill them in and make the links. I think of the suggestions in this week’s second video about how time consuming it is to create the framework for the course, to analyze which technology to use, and all of the other steps, including the alpha and beta testing and resulting tweaking, and I can only believe that none of that was done. Unfortunately, this public relations tool could ultimately backfire on Yale because the material is presented in such a boring manner to students who must be passive learners, other than writing papers in isolation, that I would think this type of course would discourage, rather than encourage, learners.

So, once again, I’m back to my idea that I first proposed to my parents back in 1978 when I decided to leave the prestigious university I was at to come back and attend my state university because there really wasn’t much difference between the two, other than the price tag. Therefore, just because the course has the name “Yale” associated with it doesn’t guarantee quality. I think instead a better adage to consider when looking at this class would be, “You get what you pay for.”