Modern Poetry – Open Yale Course - http://oyc.yale.edu/english/modern-poetry
I must say that I am now enamored by these courses. I viewed a Yale course on Modern Poetry and was amazed at how easy it really is for people to get the privilege of hearing lectures by the most amazing professors in our country. The course was extremely well laid out and designed for anyone to view.
When you enter the course, you can view the class sessions. From there, you can click to move to various points within the course so you may work at your own pace – or even just learn about the poets you wish. There is even a final exam study sheet provided to you. In each lesson, it has an overview, reading assignment, and resources. The resources tend to be a mp3, mov (high and low bandwidth), and Flash version of the lecture, as well as the html written format for quick reference. This is great for a diversity of learners, including those that are disabled. The documents that are for reference are usually provided in PDF format so you never have to worry about accessibility (Adobe Reader is available free from the Adobe site).
Other pages provided in this course are an informational page that includes a short summary of the course, as well as information about the professor. The syllabus page provides a list of texts, as well as how you are graded. From the downloads page, you may download each of the videos and course pages so that you can do the course if you are not able to get to an Internet source at all times. The books page provides access to the bookstore so that you can purchase any of the books for 10% off. Finally, for evaluation, Yale has provided a survey for students to take to provide general feedback about the course.
In comparison to our textbook, Teaching and Learning at a Distance by Michael Simonson, Sharon Smaldino, Michael Albright, and Susan Zvacek (2012), this course upholds quite a bit of the recommendations for course design. They have the goals clearly labeled and media is in various formats to meet the needs of most learners. The font size and choice is appropriate and there is plenty of white space to enhance the readability. They address copyrights by saying that not all the images will be present in the videos. All of the links seemed to be functional that I clicked on, as well.
All in all, the course designer did implement activities that would maximize learning. The only real problem that I saw was the inability to submit work and to have assignments that would promote learning. There were a variety of lectures and handouts, but very little in the way of assignments on them. The handouts were poems and such to use for assignments, but no given prompt. I think that would be very helpful for the at-home learner; however, it would be difficult to provide a literature course without feedback. I still plan on reading through this course and attempting it on my own though – just to say I “attended” a class at Yale!
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