Back to school

At least the professor can’t call on me.
And I hope he didn’t notice that I dozed off for a minute.
That’s one of the advantages of taking a course via the Internet.
Another is that you don’t have to look for a seat, which is a good thing since more than 39,000 people are registered for the same course.
You read correctly: More than 39,000 people.
It was sometime late last summer when I stumbled onto Coursera, and I don’t recall where I happened to hear of it.
But what I found when I went to www.coursera.org literally blew my mind.
Coursera, you see, is the granddaddy of MOOCs. What’s a MOOC? It’s short for Massive Open Online Course.
And Coursera offers hundreds of them.
Best of all, they’re free.
Anyone with a good Internet connection and a decent computer can sign up to take a course. There’s no college credit given, but if you’re looking to keep your brain sharp, there’s plenty of activity to be found.
Right now, more than 2.5 million people have taken courses and the number keeps growing.
Perhaps what is most remarkable is the breadth of course offerings and the caliber of the universities involved.
Here’s a sample of current offerings:
•Fundamentals of Electrical Engineering, a 12-week class.
•Fantasy and Science Fiction, an 11-week class.
•Fundamentals of Human Nutrition, a 10-week class.
•Introduction to Digital Sound Design, a 4-week class.
•Women and the Civil Rights Movement, a 12-week class.
•The Ancient Greeks, a 7-week class.
That’s just a random sampling to give you some idea how wide the range is.
A total of 33 universities have partnered with Coursera to produce the classes, which involve video lectures and quizzes and may include outside reading and discussion groups, both online and in-person.
Among the universities are some familiar names: The Ohio State University, Caltech, Stanford, Brown, Rice, and Johns Hopkins. And some that are less familiar: The University of Edinburgh, University of London, University of Toronto, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.
With a line-up like that and the knowledge that the courses were free, it was probably inevitable that I sign up, which I did last month.
The first question was what course to take. The “catalog” gives you some idea of the requirements and the expected commitment in terms of time, usually 2-3 hours a week. For instance, one course on galaxies said you should have taken college-level astronomy. That ruled me out.
An introduction to philosophy class lost my interest during the preview lecture describing the syllabus.
Finally, I settled on an unlikely one for my Coursera maiden voyage: A class called Astrobiology and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life taught by professors from the University of Edinburgh in Scotland.
One week in to a 7-week course, it’s going pretty well, even if I did doze off in one lecture. I’ve taken my first couple of quizzes and have the option to re-take them to raise my score.
Participants are notified of a new module each week and have seven days to listen to the lectures and take the quizzes, then a new module is made available.
During the week, it’s possible to log on to a class discussion group and share thoughts with somebody in, say, Nairobi or Melbourne who is taking the class at the same time.
No word yet on whether any extraterrestrials are enrolled.[[In-content Ad]]