Coursera Experience - May 2014

I finished up two courses in April:

• Archaeology’s Dirty Little Secrets (Brown University)
• Roman Architecture (Yale University)

They were both thoroughly enjoyable and the Discussion Forums held a rich assortment of pictures that is used as a ‘last hurrah’ for the course material. There are two courses that continue into May and one that starts just at the end of the month:

• The Emergence of the Modern Middle East (Tel Aviv University). I have read one of the reference books I found on Paperbackswap and still have another one to go. I also browsed The Architecture of Cairo course material from MIT which seemed to integrate some of what I was learning at the end of the Roman Architecture course and this one.
• Introduction to Systems Biology (Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai). At first, I thought this course was going to take me way back to the biology courses I took as an undergraduate….but then I realized that it was going to do much more than that. This one is integrated biology with all the modeling and statistical analysis I did in my computer science based career!
• The Art and Archaeology of Ancient Nubia (Emory University).  I could resist starting another archaeology related course!

And there are 2 more that start up at the end of May

• The Diversity of Exoplants (University of Geneva). I want to take this one since it is such a hot topic in my daughter’s field.
• Preventing Chronic Pain: A Human Systems Approach (University of Minnesota). There are several people in family that deal with chronic pain; I’m always interested in learning about the current state-of-the-art on topics like this.