The Impact of Open Source Courses: Harvard Open Courses: Open Learning Initiative www.extension.harvard.edu/open-learning/initiative This site is an example of a well-planned open course. The website gives assignment details and expectations. The site gives users access to course websites and the syllabus for the course. The course also gives many options for learning in the form of Web Conference for Synchronous learners and Video Conferencing for Asynchronous learning. These courses are definitely designed for a distance learning environment. The learner is given several choices for distance learning, Online-Only courses and Online Option in on-campus. The Online Only option consists of video-taped lectures online that the student can watch at any time. The Online Option in on campus courses features the option to watch the lecture in person at any time or attend the lecture on campus during the class time. In the on-line course demo, pictured below, you can see the professor lecturing to the left and the instructors power point presentation was to the right of the screen. This approach gives the learner a visual and a audio to help in their understanding of the content. Image This approach also gives the learner the chance to stop and start at a particular point. The sections of the lecture are synchronized with the slides and can be accessed easily. The courses on this site, I believe are following the recommendations of for online instruction as listed in the course textbook. The course does follow the recommendations of the textbook that highlight the important aspects of the planning process for distance learning. In the textbook, these aspects are highlighted by Dick, Carey & Carey, 2009 as the learners, the content, methods and materials used, as well as the technology (Simonson, 2012). The learners, who are clearly students at Harvard are given opportunities to access the course and opportunities to access help from the instructor. The learners are given access to the content of the course through the syllabus as well as access to course evaluations from past students. The methods for accessing the course lectures are through Online only course or Online option in on-campus, everything else is accessible on the web site. Other materials are easily accessible on the site as well. As far as the course designer, I believe that they did not implement course activities that maximize active learning for the students. The courses that I saw consisted of activities such as papers, no activities that are interactive were listed. There should be an honorable mention for the MIT Open Course Site page. There are clear expectations presented for paper requirements along with examples of acceptable forms in pdf. downloads.The course website presents the learner with access to readings in the form of a link to Amazon.com to purchase the textbooks. The learner is given links to resources Writing services and examples of acceptable submissions. A scoring rubric is also given to the learner as well for guidelines. The topics for the course are given in table format with readings and assignments.