The course was informative and the diverse instructors friendly. The historical lesson on PLATO also made me want to go to University of Illinois to study.
I have learned a lot from this course. That said, it shares a number of issues with Instructional Design Foundations and Applications, which seems to be its companion course, and which I recently completed. As such, my remarks will be similar, too.
The design of this course could stand to be further enhanced, based on the very principles and concepts that it covers. The videos are far too long and too unvaried to be engaging or memorable. The "talking head" format of the videos adds little value; I suspect that providing the lessons in the form of slide presentations that students could work through on their own would have been just as, if not more, effective. Creating smaller chunks of content would also make everything more manageable.
Some of the content is either outdated or missing. The orientation video, for instance, mentions synchronous sessions and peer reviews, but neither element was required. The second module does not discuss global citizenship at all, even if it is identified as a key concept. The same module also only mentions the seven affordances of technology-enhanced learning very briefly, without sufficient detail.
With regard to the assessments, I found the quizzes a bit frustrating, because they contemplate very thin slices of the content that students are expected to have thoroughly digested beforehand—a three-item quiz for a 30-minute video appears to be rather disproportional. Moreover, the items seem to be improperly weighted: an item where one has to select all of the correct choices has the same number of points as an item where there is just one correct choice. Finally, there is no application involved. At best, the quizzes test one's reading comprehension.
