Week Five Application--Open Course Review

I reviewed MIT Open Course Ware HST 151 Principles of Pharmacology. This is a graduate level course originally taught in the Spring of 2005. The course features selected lecture notes, assignments without solutions (without answers) and exams with solutions (answers). The student is provided a syllabus, calendar, readings, lecture notes, assignments, exams and study materials.
In this week’s reading we have learned that planning for instruction in a distant learning course is an important part of the success of the course. The first concept we have learned is that a course previously taught in a traditional classroom may need to be retooled. The focus of the instruction shifts to visual presentations, engaged learners, and careful timing of presentations of information. It also discusses revising the material to illustrate key concepts or topics using tables, figures and other visual representation.
The open course, Principles of Pharmacology, appears to me to be a traditional classroom presentation just saved and put online and called distant learning. It is strictly reading a lecture and textbooks. There is not any visual presentation to assist the student in learning the concepts. It is not engaging for a student. The site is easy to use but without any visual engagement for the student.
With a little better planning this course could be very engaging to the learner. The instructional designer could have added a video lecture or demonstration to add excitement to the course.
The course is planned having a lecture, reading, assignments and exams. I do disagree with the way they present the answers to the exams and not to the assignments. They do not present any answer to the assignments so a student would not know if they are on the right track or not. They do however, present the answers to the exams which is good but I would have had then on a separate paper so the student could test their knowledge without the answers staring them in the face.
Overall the course content is very good but the delivery does not follow the core concepts of a distant education course.
Resources:
Simonson, M., Smaldino, S., Albright, M., & Zvacek, S. (2009). Teaching and learning at a distance: Foundations of distance education (4th ed.) Boston, MA: Pearson.
http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/health-sciences-and-technology/hst-151-principles-of-pharmacology-spring-2005/index.htm