On MOOCs: Projects, Practice and Perspective

Some of the best courses were University of Michigan’s Social Network Analysis, Johns Hopkins University’s Data Analysis and Computing for Data Analysis, Stanford University’s Machine Learning and Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s  Science of Uncertainty, Introduction to Probability. Furthermore, I provide a complete list of the courses I have finished as well as some reviews, scores and rough “skills learned” on my blog at jakublangr.com.

Best practices
I think there are 3 key strategies to successfully finishing the MOOC. But the key insight is that most people who do not finish a MOOC usually do not finish it because of lack of time, not because of lack of aptitude. So lack of persistence is your key enemy. To crush your enemy, you have to:

1. Assess quickly the time commitment of a course.
I still remember that convex optimization course by Stanford that I really wanted to take. But, alas, I could not. I did not have the time as I had a busy schedule and I was doing another MOOC (or two?) at the time. I realized that this was a rigorous class that required substantial time commitment. But I needed to drop it, because if you do not take each commitment seriously, you will probably not finish any of them.

2. Honor your commitments
Meaning also that you should immediately unenroll from the courses you know you cannot finish. This will hopefully also give you the respect towards your commitment that you will also finish the ones you have elected to keep.

3. Commit to deadlines, minimum benchmarks
There is a reason why I only finished one free course on Udacity: because there are no deadlines (well, until they introduced the payment by the month). These help you get stuff done, because now you have to or all (or at least something) is lost. All major platforms have it now, so please use it.

Benchmarks are also very helpful: there were courses (like both of the SNA ones) where I knew I wanted a distinction, because I wanted to know the stuff well. Then there were courses, where I just wanted a brief overview so I only watched lectures (not listed, because I technically, haven't finished them). But decide quickly what your goals are and then follow them.

Generally, I think MOOCs will fundamentally change the nature of education (for reasons that deserve a separate post), provide that they manage to meaningfully integrate themselves to people's lives. We could already see many interesting initiatives like the one by Obama for teachers for their professional development.  But currently MOOCs are mostly a domain of people who are happy to sacrifice some degree of social life for learning (totally worth it). Though I do not doubt there are exceptions, it seems that most people I know (and online statistics confirm this) are too busy to actually finish the courses.

Anyway, hope this was helpful. As always, I would welcome any reaction. Get in touch!