MOOCs (massive open online courses) have great potential. You can find everything from courses in language to psychology, genetics, art, and more. The biggest problem with a MOOC is that the learner has to be massively self-motivated and organized.
I recently finished up a class on Coursera (Imagining Other Earths) that delved into characteristics of planets, how we define habitable planets, and how life on exoplanets might be detected. Except “finished” is probably putting too strong a word on it. I turned in all the written work and engaged in peer evaluation of other papers, but I fell away from watching the videos early on.
I’m currently enrolled in a class on epigenetics, but I haven’t watched any of the videos or done assignments or quizzes. I’ll probably save the videos to watch at my leisure, but mostly, I’m using it as a source for collected information on epigenetics, as the instructor has already assembled a wealth of supporting material.
Another class starts today on diversity of exoplanets. I don’t know yet how much I’m going to participate in it versus just using it to further my understanding of what is already known.
What’s the common thread for these? They’re all topics I’m using to enrich the background of my science fiction. I can deepen my fantasy writing, too; the art & archaeology of ancient Nubia is something I’m watching to see whether it opens up a new course. I might look at Fantasy and Science Fiction: The Human Mind, Our Modern World, too, just out of curiosity.
There’s a lot out there — and this is just one site. If I wanted to learn to code, I’d be all over Codecademy; and Khan Academy I see mentioned most for math, but they have history, biology, computers, and more. And then there’s iTunes University, which has both audio and video courses from many different universities. And MIT and Stanford have their own free online learning. It’s a grand time to want to learn.
Have you done any online courses? If so, what did you think?
