Designing for Distance

T.H. White once said in The Once and Future King “The best thing for being sad," replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, "is to learn something. That's the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn.” This is true when thinking about educating yourself through an online course. The course that I chose to analyze on its effectiveness as an online distance course is the Exposing Digital Photography Computer Science E-7 course through the Open Culture website. This course is designed to teach students about the terms and use of digital cameras. The instructor states that students are “not required to own a digital camera, but if you do, one with a manual mode and an option for RAW is recommended” (Exploring Digital Photography). According to what I have learned over the past few weeks I understand that a good distance education course should be able to do certain things for the students who are participating in the course. One of the things that I will focus on is that a good distance course should have a website that can be easily navigated through. This Computer Science E-7 course has just that. Once you enter the website on the left hand side you have an introduction from the instructor along with his email address if you need to contact him. He also gives students a brief look into what the course is about along with some other information you will need to know for the course. The instructor then puts on the right side of his website, links to his lectures. Students also have resources linked to the lectures. Some of these resources include links, slides, and videos. In these the instructor goes into great detail about the materials needed or used for digital cameras. This is a great way of having students connect to the course. Morrison, Ross, and Kemp state that “When the learners have an understanding of the reasons why they are participating in a particular type of instructional activity, they are better able to use that experience to expedite their own learning (Teaching and Learning at a Distance Foundations of Distance Education). A lot of times instructors focus so much on how to make their website so “pretty” that they forget that there must be a certain flow in order to keep students from playing a guessing game or getting frustrated when looking for what they need.