You may remember reading some Newsletter articles last year about a service called Coursera that had recently joined forces with Hopkins. The article went on to describe how Coursera would open learning up for thousands of people with the click of a mouse button. Johns Hopkins was now part of elite institutions who were making strides to share knowledge with everyone via the internet, and everyone seemed happy.
Yet no one talks about it anymore. Until now.
When arriving at the page of Coursera, thumbnails of available courses jump out at you, and suddenly a Duke course on neuroscience is sharing a space with a statistics class at the University of Nanjing. You can search for classes by topic or by school name. The complete list of participating universities and colleges is under the top tab "Universities" (where else?), and by clicking on any name, the website takes you to the complete list of courses offered by that school.
What isn't readily apparent is the information about what Coursera is. This is a system that partners with universities to offer short courses over a period of a few weeks intended to supplement courses taken for credit at a school. While most schools don't give credit for Coursera classes, a student will receive a certificate of accomplishment upon satisfactory completion of a class. Different standards apply to different classes, of course, but the one thing common to them all is that no class costs any money. That's right: completely free. Plus it looks good on resumes because it shows you pursue independent learning (or so I hope).
Signing up for any class is as easy as creating a Coursera account. By doing so you give the usual information about email and such, but you also sign the honor code and general website policy. One of the first policies is each person gets one account, so be careful! After you sign up for an account, you'll be able to register for any or all of the courses. Most require you to watch a short (less than 20 minutes) lecture on the skills you'll need for the next project or the next step in the curriculum, and then you'll be told an assignment for the week. Some of these assignments are graded by the instructor, but most are going to be peer-reviewed. This means that someone from Brazil could be grading a Kenyan's work, which is awesome for global teamwork. So long as you have internet, you can take a Coursera class. It's that easy.
The author has already signed up for a few courses, one of which is on making small games using the Python computing language, but she hasn't yet completed one. When it happens I'll be sure to let you know how it goes. As for the actual technology behind the lectures, it is probably like the virtual classroom environment seen before with Elluminate Live. Nevertheless it is sure to be quite the learning experience for all involved.Yet no one talks about it anymore. Until now.
When arriving at the page of Coursera, thumbnails of available courses jump out at you, and suddenly a Duke course on neuroscience is sharing a space with a statistics class at the University of Nanjing. You can search for classes by topic or by school name. The complete list of participating universities and colleges is under the top tab "Universities" (where else?), and by clicking on any name, the website takes you to the complete list of courses offered by that school.
What isn't readily apparent is the information about what Coursera is. This is a system that partners with universities to offer short courses over a period of a few weeks intended to supplement courses taken for credit at a school. While most schools don't give credit for Coursera classes, a student will receive a certificate of accomplishment upon satisfactory completion of a class. Different standards apply to different classes, of course, but the one thing common to them all is that no class costs any money. That's right: completely free. Plus it looks good on resumes because it shows you pursue independent learning (or so I hope).
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| The sign up page on the Coursera website. |
Signing up for any class is as easy as creating a Coursera account. By doing so you give the usual information about email and such, but you also sign the honor code and general website policy. One of the first policies is each person gets one account, so be careful! After you sign up for an account, you'll be able to register for any or all of the courses. Most require you to watch a short (less than 20 minutes) lecture on the skills you'll need for the next project or the next step in the curriculum, and then you'll be told an assignment for the week. Some of these assignments are graded by the instructor, but most are going to be peer-reviewed. This means that someone from Brazil could be grading a Kenyan's work, which is awesome for global teamwork. So long as you have internet, you can take a Coursera class. It's that easy.
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| After you create an account, you'll sign in here. |
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| The courses that I'm currently enrolled in. Sounds like fun! |
What are you waiting for? There are Hopkins (and Princeton and UCSD and...) classes to take! Free, interactive, collaborative, and useful--it doesn't get better than that.
This is a very wonderful post. I have confusion about "Coursera". What is the meaning of it?
ReplyDeleteCoursera is an online conglomeration of abbreviated courses that are meant to supplement traditional university classes. It's just the name of the website, but the courses are supplied by the universities that are registered to it.
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