[LINK] Broadband for a Broad Land

[Tom Worthington]

stephen at melbpc.org.au wrote:
> As one example, MIT OpenCourseWare <http://ocw.mit.edu> units are freely 
> available for anyone to pursue ... they aren't distance learning classes, 
> there is no instructor, no contact with MIT, no credits. ...

I am not particuarly impressed with MIT's OpenCourseWare, because, as 
you say, they are not distance learning classes.

The UK's Open University provides a better model, offering material
designed for distance learning and support for study groups.

OU are using a Creative Commons licence. This allows the material to be
used for free by schools and to be modified. OU use the Australian 
developed Moodle free open source software and provide study notes as 
web pages formatted as an electronic book.

As an example the course "Environmental factors and organisations", 
takes a notional 6 hour to complete, with the equivalent of ten pages of 
notes. They also provide forums for self study groups:
<http://openlearn.open.ac.uk/course/view.php?id=2589>.

The educational style and format used by OU is simialr to that used for 
my Green ICT course, offered through ANU, ACS and Open
Universities Australia <http://www.tomw.net.au/green/>.
This is no a coincidence, as I was trained in the technique by the 
Australian Computer Society, who adapted the approach developed by staff 
at OU: 
<http://www.ijcim.th.org/v15nSP4/P09SEARCC_ComputerProfessionalEducation.pdf>.

> And, given the demanding-on-bandwidth requirements for these MIT courses
> one would suggest broadband is vital for an effective self-participation. ...

There is a philosophical divide amongst e-learning designers, between
the video people and the non-video people. I am in the non-video camp: I
don't see providing videos of lectures online are being very useful (and
it uses up bandwidth). Face-to-face lectures are not a very useful 
teaching technique and videos of such lectures are of even less value.

Instead I start with what look like old fashioned lecture notes and 
suppliment these with multimedia. The key point is not these materials, 
but how the discussion between students, staff and the assessment are 
managed.

The technique being used for the ANU engineering "Hubs and Spokes"
courses has slides with audio, which is better educationally and uses 
less bandwidth. See "Blended Learning for Course Sharing – A
Case Study", Kim Blackmore, Lauren Kane, Australian National University,
2010:
<http://hubsandspokes.cecs.anu.edu.au/files/Blended_Learning_for_Course_Sharing_A_Case_Study.pdf>.

> With a widespread & speedy NBN, we might even crack a mention on MIT OCW. ...

Australia is a world leader in e-leaning. Adopting MIT's OCW approach
would be a retrograde step.


-- 
Tom Worthington FACS CP HLM, TomW Communications Pty Ltd. t: 0419496150
PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617, Australia  http://www.tomw.net.au
Adjunct Senior Lecturer, School of Computer Science, The
Australian National University http://cs.anu.edu.au/courses/COMP7310/
Visiting Scientist, CSIRO ICT Centre: http://bit.ly/csiro_ict_canberra