The Impact of Open Source

Review of Standford U on iTunes

Four middle schools in my district are participating in a technology initiative next school year where each student and teacher will receive an iPad for instruction. So I chose to review Standford U on iTunes as an Open Source because the teachers and curriculum department in my district will be creating content for our own library on iTunes. As our district creates this content, I want to be able to assist and guide the creation and use of the content for our students and teachers.

Is the Course designed for distance learning?

iTunes has a specific format and file storage system for its files and audio/video recordings. There isn’t much room to create a new structure or adapt the current one. That being said, I will say that the course in not designed for distance learning as a sole delivery method. There are a few factors that determine this evaluation. First, the objectives of the course are clearly established. A user of the content will have to view each individual episode in order to determine the objectives of what they are learning. Secondly, there is a lack of discussions or additional activities to engage the learners linked within the course. iTunes only allows you to store content so the students would have to go elsewhere to participate in group activities or discussion thread. Finally, there is a learning curve associated with using iTunes. The instructor and students will have to have access to iTunes (which is a free download) and instructions on how to view and download content. The process of accessing content is not intuitive. Additional information will be needed for accessing the content on mobile devices as well. iTunes is a good supplement to a course but not a stand alone course.

Follow recommendation for online instruction?

The courses on iTunes does follow the organizational guidelines as listed in Chapter 5 of the textbook. The courses are broken down into units, modules and topics (Simonson, 2009). For example, the course The Future of the Internet is broken down into smaller modules such as Internet Economics and Applications. However, the courses do not follow instruction/teaching guidelines and time frames in that the modules are not broken down per week. There is the possibility that the Instructor will email the students each week and there may be a synchronous chat held offline or using another tool. These guidelines are not found within iTunes. The course also does not follow the “advice” listed in Chapter 9 of the course text. For example, the courses in iTunes do not integrate the power of the web into the course. Since the modules are audio/video recordings, there isn’t much room for student interactivity.

Maximize active learning through activities?

Unfortunately there are no course activities aside from view the audio/video podcasts uploaded into iTunes. If there are activities, they are probably built into the recording such as "Pause the tape here and reflect in your journal regarding the effectiveness of Google Search on the Internet." In order to make the podcasts more interactive for participants and to make iTunes a sole delivery method, the creators of the uploaded content should consider adding weblinks to their podcasts to provide more activity as indicated by How To.

References:

eHow. (n.d.). How to Add Links to Your Podcasts Using GarageBand. Retrieved June 4, 2011 from http://www.ehow.com/how_2030280_add-links-podcast-using-garageband.html

Simonson, M., Smaldino, S., Albright, M., & Zvacek, S. (2009). Teaching and learning at a distance: Foundations of distance education (4th ed.) Boston, MA: Pearson.