Carol Gering in her blog described the process she followed to review and visualize OpenCourseware at three institutions.
Earlier this year I performed a review of OpenCourseware courses from three different institutions: MIT, Carnegie Mellon, and The Open University. I evaluated three courses from each of the three institutions.
As I reviewed the courses, I kept a log of features that I recognized as valuable. At the end of my review I codified the results by creating a master list of features, and then organizing the features into five categories:
- Site Structure and Features
- Coruse Structure and Features
- Types of Content
- Efficacy of Content
- Community of Learners
After creating the list, I went back through all nine courses and marked whether or not each feature existed in each course. I found that a binary answer wasn’t always satisfactory. In some cases, the feature existed, but wasn’t complete or fully developed.
My next step was to assign a relative value for each feature. It was obvious during my review that different institutions valued different features. To serve my purposes, I needed to determine the value that my organization (Center for Distance Education) places on each item in the list.
