Coursera Experience - August 2014

Quite a few courses ended in July:

• Diversity of Exoplanets (University of Geneva)
• Preventing Chronic Pain (University of Minnesota)
• Paradoxes of War (Princeton University)
• An Introduction to Global Health (University of Copenhagen)

I enjoyed all of them but there were times I thought I had started more than  I could possible finish. It is incredibly difficult to forego a course on a interesting topic; I need to develop more will power!

As I start August, only two courses are in session and I am enjoying the reduction. It is challenging to keep up with the classes while I am traveling….but I have succeeded in listening to the lectures. I’ll have to catch up with the discussion forums and assignments later. The two courses are:

Globalization and You (University of Washington). I just finished the module on Money last week. The history of monetary policy and outcomes was very well done. It may be the best module of the course!

Social Psychology (Wesleyan University). Every week there is something that surprises me....and quite a lot that is very applicable to everyday life. The forums are lively in this one ---- worth the time to peruse and participate.

I have one course that will be starting up in August after I am back home!

Beauty, Form, and Function: An Exploration of Symmetry (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore). I am looking forward to this course for several reasons: it is a very different topic area from other courses I’ve taken, it is offered by a different university that other courses, and I anticipate that this topic will benefit from the cultural diversity what will be part of the MOOC students.

Coursera Experience - June 2014

May was a relatively easy month from a course load perspective. I finished two courses:

• The Emergence of the Modern Middle East (Tel Aviv University) - I was surprised at how little I understood of even the events that have occurred in my lifetime. I generally keep up with news but I clearly needed more context than the news stories provided…..or maybe the passage of time has brought enlarged perspective of historians.
• Introduction to Systems Biology (Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai) - Probably the hardest course I’ve taken on Coursera so far.

And only had one that continued on for the full month.

• The Art and Archaeology of Ancient Nubia (Emory University) - This one has short videos and then pointers to reading. I am supplementing the recommended reading with items from the Internet Archive and some books I got via paperbackswap. This one will be over by the end of June - which is a good think because I have so many more that are starting!

There were two that started right at the end of May.

• The Diversity of Exoplants (University of Geneva) - I am taking this course to understand more about what my daughter’s research is all about in graduate school.
• Preventing Chronic Pain: A Human Systems Approach (University of Minnesota) - I am fortunate to not currently have chronic pain….but prevention is always easier than recovery. And there are others in my family that do have challenges caused by pain.

The challenge increases in June as three more courses start up. There are just so many good courses being offered that I can’t seem to resist.

• Paradoxes of War (Princeton University) - Every course I have taken from Princeton has been excellent….and I’m looking forward to this one.
• An Introduction to Global Health (University of Copenhagen) - This course and the next one on the list are part of my trend to think more globally about issues. There seem to be so many areas that transcend the boundaries of nations and governments.
• Globalization and You (University of Washington) - It will be interesting to find out how this course meshes with the one on Global Health.

It’s going to be quite a course load by the end of June!

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.