The immense growth in science and technology, especially in the communications sector has had a far reaching impacts on various aspects of human life. One of the areas of human life which has benefitted enormously from the technological breakthroughs in the digital world has been the field of education which has been drastically transformed. In the earliest years of the digital revolution, computer aided education revolutionised teaching and learning in the classroom but now, with the coming of Web 2.0, the whole concept of education relative to the outreach and individual learning that is possible have become great. MOOC platforms which allow students to access learning in any other part of the world has been a great enabler and has bridged …show more content…
The use of multimedia in creating MOOC platforms is significant and in order to understand the manner in which such teaching and learning takes place as well as the various elements which are part of it, a survey of two separate courses was undertaken. The first course was in the humanities and titled making and meaning in the mediaeval manuscript from Harvard University while the second was argument diagramming, a course offered by Stanford …show more content…
The two courses were clearly based upon the notion of creating authentic task, which is based on the authentic learning framework. This framework “describes characteristics of task design where it is the students who make important decisions about why, how and in what order they investigate the problem and learn the required skills.” (Lee, McLoughlin 66). This allows for self-directed and self-regulated learning which is one of the chief needs of any distance education program since it is based at the pace at which a student is able to work in achieving its target. Even though both the courses were self-regulated and self-paced, the course from Harvard University was much more appealing mainly because of the way in which it sought to include principles of multimedia in its creation and execution. The course from Stanford University was rather dull and pedantic when compared to the Harvard course because of the lack of adequate multimedia elements in it which led to boredom and fatigue very often, and took away from the learning