What the hell is a MOOC? MOOC stands for massively open online course and they are offered by a variety of providers. I started hearing more about them last summer, especially in all of the higher education literature. I have all sorts of opinions on whether or not these services will make money or how much it will change higher education. Some of my thoughts have evolved as I have taken different courses offered through Coursera.
I started off the MOOC adventure by taking an introduction to statistics course. At the time, I was considering a second master's degree and suspected I would need a college level statistics course. I've heard horror stories about statistics classes so I thought this would serve as a nice introduction to the topic. I was also interested in checking out the MOOC madness. Hundreds of thousands of people from all over the world registered for this class. It was amazing to skim through the discussion forum and read entries on why people were taking the course. I also learned that discussion forums can try my patience. I think this forum was the worst of the four courses I have participated in. People complained about everything -- the workload, using open source software that was confusing, figuring out the assignments, deadlines, and more complaints about deadlines. I just wanted to scream at people that this was a free course taught by someone at Princeton. Deal. Honestly, I ended up sharing some of their frustrations but not because of the number of hours or lack of a certificate. It was more than a little unorganized, which was not helped by some glitches with the Coursera software. I felt bad for the graduate assistants who were helping the professor. I definitely underestimated the workload but it wasn't until a problem until I went on vacation. It was at the same time that the course content became more challenging. I ended up dropping the class. My hope is that they work out a course schedule that is more organized so I can take it again. I really liked the professor's lecture style, the assignments, and the emphasis on using R, the open source statistical software. He was definitely more detached than the other instructors I've had since this first class. He also got a little prickly on the course's Facebook page. I can't say I blame him entirely based on some of the comments but still...
Next, I took an operations management class. Looking back, I am not sure if this was really the best choice for me because I realized by the third week that I wasn't too interested in the topic. This course was completely different from the statistics one in that the professor was much more involved in responding to questions on the discussion forums. Again, this was a course that had a large number of people who registered from all over the world. I basically stopped the lectures and quizzes around the time of the mid-term.
I am close to finishing up my third course, principles of public health. I love this class. The lectures are engaging, the discussion forum is interesting to read, and the professor is very into this effort. I actually look forward to her weekly emails to the thousands of people taking the course. It has sparked my interest in epidemiology so I am already planning on signing up for an epidemiology course. The other cool thing about this course is how the global participation has made the discussion forum more interesting. During the first week, I found it interesting to read what people thought of our country's public health issues, particularly in the area of nutrition. I am going to finish this class but I decided not to complete the writing assignment.
I just started the next class on women in the civil rights movement. This is a subject of great personal interest for me since it is something I have informally studied since I was a kid. The course outline, lectures, and readings look very interesting. As with the other classes, this one also takes a different approach in the style of video lectures and assignments. This is also the first class that brings a librarian into the mix by offering a discussion forum topic for some of her university's librarians to advise on research topics. I am not sure I will complete the research papers but I plan on completing all of the other assignments.
I suspect that a lot of students taking Coursera classes are like me. They want to learn more about a subject, yet don't want to register for a course or program at a regular university. I have signed up for a lot more courses on a wide range of topics. At the very least, I have told myself to learn more about a topic and not stress about tests and assignments.
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