Carol Gering

I’ve selected nine courses to review for my graduate studies project.  I mentioned in an earlier post that open courseware (OCW) initiatives can be broadly categorized into 3 groups:

1. Those that focus on publishing documents and artifacts from classroom courses (epitomized by MIT)
2. Those that focus on the cognitive science of interaction between students and content (epitomized by OLI at Carnegie Mellon)
3. Those that incorporate social interaction between students as a key element of course design (epitomized by OpenLearn at The Open University)

As outlined in my proposal, I’ve selected 3 courses from each of these groups. I briefly considered selecting the same course (or a rough approximation) in each of the 3 categories, but quickly realized that was impractical. As a compromise, I selected a beginning language course from each of the categories. I selected languages that I’ve never studied, and I selected three different languages (so that anything I learned in one ocw course wouldn’t influence my review of the other two courses). The additional courses were chosen either because they interested me personally, or because they have potential relevance for CDE course development. I looked at each of the courses deeply enough to verify that they contained a significant amount of content.   Here’s the list:

1. Chinese I—MIT
2. French—OLI
3. Spanish: Espacios publicos—OpenLearn
4. Physics of Atmospheres and Oceans—MIT
5. Logic & Proofs—OLI
6. Exploring data: Graphs and numerical summaries—OpenLearn
7. The Nature of Creativity—MIT (Linguistics and Philosophy)
8. Economics—OLI
9. Reading Visual Images—OpenLearn (Social Sciences)