I finally received my results for my MAODE course that I took this year (2009) for the Open University (H800). Now that I've passed (horray), I feel I can really 'spill the beans' about what I learned from doing the course.
The overriding feature that I learnt was as much about what NOT to do when offering a distance learning course as what one might, or could do. Part of my rationale for chosing OU is that they being the first major distance learning educational establishment would be the 'Oxbridge' of the distance learning mode. Yet their actual delivery of the course and how it was processed was a mixed bag of both good, bad and of course ugly.
For instance my two HUGE peeves throughout the course was a lack of working to 'open' standards both in their coded pages through which we accessed the course, and in their requirements for handing in assignments. I think of this as the 'Ugly' as in the classic Sergio Leone film 'The Good, the Bad & the Ugly'. Let's tackle each in turn.
Web compliancy
In the end, I had to use a minimum of THREE web browsers to access my course and interact with it well. I ended up usually flicking between 5 browsers. The only one that displayed the H800 pages correctly was Camino. However, Camino could not accept my electronic assignments, for that I had to use Firefox (but Firefox would not display the forum pages correctly). Since I'm on a Mac, I ended up using Safari to successfully employ a Delicious applet in the tool bar to quickly tag sites of interest. Yet my preferred browser is OmniWeb (which opens URLs by default on my system) which has all my significant bookmarks.
The only way to cope with this confusion was to be able to use:
- two screens so I could see two browsers or a browser and my word processor at the same time;
- Expose, which is a technology in the Mac OS system that allows a user to quickly find a relevant window from any application even if many are open; and
- Spaces, another Mac OS technology (10.5 and above) that allows there be different conceptual screen spaces that can house different application windows open on these different spaces (so one space could be for 'internet browsing' whilst another could be for a browser with the forums open on it).
Without these technologies it would be like the old dark days of staying on one application at a time, closing it down before opening up another application - a-n-d t-h-a-t t-a-k-e-s t-i-m-e.
Formatting of Assignments
This is my second course where OU has insisted on using MS Word as the de facto standard for submitting written work. Why if the university is so 'open' are we bound into essentially a commercial product which is of (at best) dubious quality. "Well", I can hear the OU administration defensively stating, ".doc, or .rtf formats are fairly ubiquitous standards", but it turns out they are not ubiquitous because there are various flavours of .doc, or .rtf which render the document differently depending not only on the version of MS Word that is opening it, but also, which operating system, which fonts are installed on the operating system and what the default printer set up is for a particular system. The result is those awkward splits where the pagination has changed and suddenly there is a massive empty space where once was a graphic, an orphaned figure caption and subsequent paragraphs that are ALL IN CAPS AND EMBOLDENED FOR NO APPARENT REASON.
Is there a solution? Of course, it is made by Adobe called the 'portable document format' or 'pdf'. This is a solution to print any document from any system with any fonts and associated graphics to a 'pdf' document which will display exactly as the author wanted it to. Furthermore the tutors and lecturers can make notes and annotations on such a document and we the students can still see this in on the free 'Adobe Reader' application available in Windows, Linux and Mac operating systems. So why doesn't OU use this? Cost for the professional Adobe Acrobat (minimal for a large professional organisation)? Laziness? Inertia? All of the above?
I personally do not use MS Word, I do use a bibliographic database. OU forced me to use another word processor which did not interact as well or as smoothly with my bibliographic database, the result of which was many instances where my document was formatted without the citation or appropriate reference in the bibliography, but instead some cryptic citation marker such as {Taylor, R. (2001), Distillate fractional chromo..., #1009834}. My tutor of course (correctly) marked me down for this. My point though is that I have tools that enable me to operate as a reasonable consultant and/or researcher in the published world, and yet I'm not effectively allowed to use them because the OU is not 'open'.
Practicing Web 2.0
Another peeve that myself and some of my tutor group encountered was an apparent double standard in talking about and promoting 'Web 2.0' technology and the implications for teaching/learning, and yet sticking to a totally traditional individually written assignment. There was no apparent desire to engage in assignments and appropriate assessments that would be more 'Web 2.0' and therefore more collaborative; I would argue more authentic to the real world scenarios. The rationale handed down from on high through to our tutor was essentially 'rules is rules'.
What H800 did right
OK so much for the 'bad' & the 'ugly' what about the 'good'?
In both courses that I've done under OU, the two stand out features have both been the tutor; and the ability to feel connected to the tutor group, ie the other students. H800 supplied a fantastic tutor again (maybe I'm just lucky), but what was different for me was the sense of contact with my fellow students. Four stand out technologies were used to enable this. The first was the forums that were set up on the OU space using Moodle. I started to get a real sense of people as real individuals. The second was the use of Skype to do conference calls. Sorry but OU's solution complete with collaborative white board etc just was too flaky for us to use. A number of us in our tutorial figured out we were Skype users and found it 'no problem'. Hearing a voice to a name and then actually interacting with them makes the personalities really come forward. So OU didn't really get us using Skype but they did get it right in that they were encouraging us to talk voice to voice as it were. Thirdly was the insistence in constructing blogs. You're reading this particular blog in part because of OU forced me to start blogging. Reading the blogs of my fellow tutorial groups, and others indeed in other tutorial groups on H800, was a real eye opener. Finally, I can't believe I'm saying this, but having poo-pooed Twitter for so long, it was another channel in which I started to understand the few of my tutorial group that were regularly posting tweets.
Two other technologies also helped but they weren't particularly inspired by OU, one was the use of Skype. OU's own voice to voice application (some horrendous java application) just did not cut the mustard. I also met up with a fellow student attending a conference in Second Life.