Last week I visited the six sites about open education courses. I choose some of them, specially where I know the content, and I produced a grid (attachment) to value what is required by the questions.

• What do these representative open education projects have in common? Well they have a lot of things in common as:
  
  • the mission: all these courses want to share cultural contents as free and openly available;
  • all these courses (but I didn't see all of them) are structured as e-learning courses in linear sequence;
  • all of them have multimedia contents but, over all, they're rich of text.
  • every course has interaction tools (normally a forum or e-mail) but they're often empty.
• What differentiates them?
  
  • some of these sites allow to edit and publish new courses (they're also repository);
  • some of them have courses in different languages; non only English;
  • the quality of the contents is quite different, in some case is excellent, in other hand not satisfying;
  • some, not all,  of them individualize the target of students , the time a lesson takes, and others useful informations;
  • sometimes there is a tutor (I found an automatic one)
• In the context of open education projects, what does "quality" mean? This is the most diffucult question, because it's hard to define what "quality" is. I try to explain my opinion. At first I try to define what is an e-learning course. As I learned and wrote in other weeks, contents are only a component of the teaching/learning process. The didactical way of all these course looks like a WBT, where is assumed that users want hardly to learn, so they start with their strong motivation. But, I think, is difficult to arrive at the end of the course alone. So for me, the principal qualities of  e-learning -online- courses are:
  
  • good contents: but they must to explain the principal concepts and let the users to discover the matter through their researches. To do it is necessay to...
  • ...have interactions tools (at least one for topic) with which people can argue and share opinions, contents, references to create their personal knowledge (a costructivist way to learn).
  • at the other side of the network must be  people who help, facilitate, guide, value and support the learners. Unfortunatly I didn't find these quality indicators into the viewed courses. So my assessments stop at B evaluation grade.

  Emanuela Zibordi