Khan Academy and MIT Open Courseware

One of the reasons that I am pursuing a M.S in Education Technologies is to leave the high school setting and become either an instructional designer or to teach college students. In order to see pre-developed content in my area of interest, I looked at both Khan Academy and MIT OpenCourseware.

Similarities
Both of them are intended for personal, non-commercial, education use.  For teachers that want to reproduce material, they have to indicate where the materials came from.  (Khan mandates a statement while MIT mandates a source citation.)  Both of them provide free courses for learners to further their education.

Khan Academy

Khan Academy allows teachers to build courses on their platform and for learners (students and teachers) to take courses; all for free. Khan Academy focuses on K-12 material, and therefore has a feel that is more intended for children.  Learners cannot post anything inappropriate, but they can take classes and earn points for completing tasks. The videos are also more child-friendly, broken into short segments. Even though the courses feel 'elementary,' it suits the intended audience.

The one thing that I love on Khan Academy is that there are website coding classes available! Even though educational technologies does not necessarily equate to coding, it is an invaluable skill. I love that it not only covers HTML, but also CSS and Javascript. In these courses, the videos are interactive--you can even edit the background that they are filling in to customize it yourself. The mini-challenges are engaging with tips, guidelines, and self-created content. In these particular courses, I think it follows Kolb's experimental learning theory because learners have to watch videos (reflective observation), draw conclusions about what they saw (abstract conceptualization), work on the mini-activities (active experimentation), and then create final activities (concrete experience).

Actually, I intend on taking these website coding classes because they will expand my job skills and will help me personalize my webpages. If I become an instructor for college students, I would also recommend these Khan Academy's courses to students for personal use or for (those that will become teachers) their future students' use.

MIT OpenCourseware

First of all, I liked the ease of finding courses by topic and sub-topic; I found "educational technology" very quickly. There are 7 classes and 2 supplemental sources for the undergraduate level, and 6 courses at the graduate level. The only class I don't foresee myself ever using was the one about architecture. As a potentially future college instructor, the undergraduate courses and supplemental sources would be an invaluable resource. Each course includes the syllabus; the text books; as well as the assignments, readings, activities, and topics.  Some of the courses are structured differently (days/weeks/sessions), but they all include a calendar for pacing. Obviously this would be a great resource for anyone (students or myself) who wants to continue their learning and/or explore a particular subject without having to pay for college tuition.

As a professor, I could use some of the courses as guidelines to developing my own courses. If I wanted to use any of the course materials, I would be able to (with the aforementioned citation), but for the content marked "all rights reserved," I would have to make sure that all usage adheres to the Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for OpenCourseWare.  The materials, obviously, lend themselves to a fully online course. However, if I were to teach a face-to-face class, I would reconstruct the activities to create a 'flipped classroom.' I could follow the outline of a pre-made course and make it my own. The readings and lectures would be online. I would use classroom time to follow social learning theory with in-class discussions to review and further explore the homework. I would also include pair or small group activities like creating lesson plans incorporating the technology or theory covered in the homework in order to address social learning theory and to make the content more interactive.