MOOC

MOOC. Massively Open Online Course. The wave of the future for education? I am not sure. But if you have 5-10 hours of extra time a week and want to refresh your memory or learn something new, this is a prime time to take advantage of some of the greatest minds in the world for FREE.

I had in mind a long winded post discussing the pros/cons of the online vs traditional education, I decided just to give the reader's digest view.

• I know for certain that all colleges fear the wave of online education, and those that can are starting their own initiatives in this area.
• Multiple tenured professors from the Ivy leagues are taking part in this movement. 
• With so many start-up rich with infused venture money they are desperately trying to differentiate, thus its a buyer's (student) market.

While each class is different, most have a weekly lecture lasting about an hour, and a weekly quiz which is graded almost as soon as you hit enter. Most have rich forums in which other students and the professor are very active at answering questions. Of course you can stop/replay any lecture you want, and since not everyone lives in your time zone, people seem to ask/answer questions all day long.

Most of the classes offer 2 formats, an audit, where you can just watch the video lectures, but don't takes the tests or able to join the forums, or a track where you take test, get graded, and at the end will receive a certificate of your grade and how you scored against your peers. Some are offering college credit, and Georgia Tech is now offering a complete masters in computer science.

Two interesting approaches are becoming even more common. Prior to taking the class you are encouraged to taking a pre test just to make you aware how well prepared you are for the class, the other which I found most helpful is during the lecture, the professor will ask you to solve a problem before he/she shows you how to solve it. It forces you to think about what you would need in order to solve the problem, thus you are more likely to pay attention to the remaining lecture.

The big MOOCs today are

https://www.coursera.org
https://www.udacity.com/
http://edx.org

Here is a 20 minute video where Sebastian Thrun (tenured prof at Stanford explaining why he left).  I strongly encourage you to watch, even you only a small  interest in MOOCs.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SkneoNrfadk

Below is a screen shot of me answering a question on a test, so if you happen to take the same class, the answer to question 1, quiz 1 of Computational Biology is 6. Of course since a computer generates the questions and scores it, its very unlikely this will even appear on a future quiz.