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OCW Reviews #1: Utah State University
Today we’re going to start a new weekly series trying out and grading university open coursewares. It seems like every week some ivory-tower starts an iniative to open up their doors to us common-folk. While everyone generally lauds these efforts, I think it’s time to ask: how good are these courses?
While here at OEDb we’re pointed out some of the best (such as these 100), in this series we’re going to look at some of the most popular and more obscure offerings with a critical eye, grading each program on (1) the number and variety of courses offered, (2) substance, (3) the material mix & accessibility and (4) overall grade.
To get this started, we’re going to take a look at the series from Utah State University, one of my favorite OCW’s. Although not the largest site out there, this is an OCW with heart, putting lots of attention into each course they post.
Number and Variety of Courses Offered: C+
Hey look, we’ve gotta call a spade a spade, right? USU isn’t going to compete with MIT or Berkeley when it comes to the shear number of courses available. 73 courses ain’t too shabby, but far too many of them are on Weed Control, Turf Management or Lambing and Sheep Management. The courses of more general interest are really excellent, but unfortunately, there aren’t enough of them - eg, there’s only one physics course and three english courses. While I can respect USU for trying to make these more rustic courses available (you aren’t going to find Cattle Management alongside the Charles River), the more general courses are so good that I wish there were more of them.
Course Substance: B+
Far too many OCW programs are lacking when it comes to the quantity and quality of materials per course. USU has done a good job focusing on fewer, well-developed courses. For instance, the course Blogs, Wikis, New Media for Learning has a tremendous amount of content and links (this is a great course to pass along to the parents). With the Quantum Mechanics course, there are pretty detailed notes for each of the 37 lectures. Also, these extension courses on agricultural topics all offer a large quantity of video that you might be hard-pressed to find anywhere else. Overall, I would say that you will find few “substance-light” me-too course on USU where little material actually available.
Material Mix & Accessibility: A-
This is the category where USU truly shines. With most of the USU courses you can say something that you cannot about far too other OCWs: you can use the course and really learn - all the materials I need to learn are provided for me. I’ve previously referred to these courses as Turn-key OCW’s.
Let’s take a look at some examples. The excellent Anthropology of Religion course has multiple videos, lecture notes, images, quizzes and links for each of the ten classes. Although, unfortunately, an interested student would probably need to but this $65 textbook, you could work with these materials and really learn. Similarly, although the excellent 1st year Chinese course would encourage you to purchase some texts, there are plenty of great video lectures and writing lessons that work well on a stand-alone basis.
Meanwhile, there are some online courses that would classify as true turn-key courses, cuash as the Instructional Games class and the English 2010 series. All in all, the courses have a good mix, generally with audio/video, lots of online materials and self-testing resources. If not for the overall reliance on non-open source overpriced textbooks, this would be an ideal example of material mix and accessibility.
Overall Score: B+
USU is an example for other programs to aspire to. The courses are well-developed and accessible while the site is clean and easy to navigate. That being said, there is still room to improve. USU should develop more courses and make them more accessible. They talk about using the Learn HTML course with 60 kids in Hong Kong and Mainland China, while asking you to buy Sam’s Teach Yourself HTML (huh?). With all the free HTML learning resources, I somehow doubt these kids got a copy of Sam’s guide.
So final grade is a B+ … we’re tough graders but just because we want more and more for free. Maybe that’s whiny and needy but if we’re going to offer “open coursewares” I think it’s fair to expect openness and full courses.
Stay tuned. Next week we’ll take a look at Berkeley.
