Knowledge is the best prep ever, because its so darned useful and so hard to have taken away. There’s also more of it than any one person could ever consume available for FREE. If you’re able to read this, you’ve got access to it. Getting information from the internet can be a “Drinking from Mr. Firehose” problem though. One great solution for making that wealth of information convenient and easy to access, pre-arranged and laid out for your perusal: MOOCs.
MOOCs are Massive Online Open Courses. Some professional educators develop an online course on a particular topic. They put the course online and allow anyone to register for it, for free. So here I was, up early this morning because I couldn’t sleep, wondering whether I should write a post for 3BY here or listen to more of my current MOOC.
Want to learn how to read skies to predict and interpret weather patterns? A MOOC will help!
What the heck? Why haven’t I ever shared with the good people reading 3BY how good a resource these MOOCs are?
What’s in MOOCs?
The heart of most of these MOOCS is a set of short video presentations. The videos tend to be five to fifteen minutes each (almost as if the educators guessed we’d be trying to fit these courses into a busy life). Some are college-lecture style, with the expert walking you through a topic. Interviews, with the educator talking to one of lead people in a particular topic in the world, are a popular format. The educator may walk you through a sample problem.
There are often question sets, too. Practice problems let you develop your own skills, if the topic lends itself to them. Knowledge test questions keep you focussed and call attention to points the educators don’t want you to miss. Discussion questions invite you to think more deeply and develop your own point of view.
If the course has a set schedule (more on that below), discussion boards let you share ideas and get feedback from other learners, and often the educators as well.
Other MOOCs involve other learning tools too; but these are the most common I’ve seen.
Salty & Spice talk about MOOC’s in this podcast!
What are the benefits of MOOCs?
You can pick a MOOC that’s run by people who stone-cold know what they’re talking about. Those experts have brought all their educational expertise to bear to gift-wrap a package that’s as easy to learn as possible and includes what those experts consider the most important ideas on the topic. The firehose of unfiltered information that is the internet is filtered down to the most important bits and served in a glass with a little umbrella garnish for your edification.
You get to pick which MOOCs you take, so you can satisfy yourself of the quality of your source. You get to pick topics. Not everything you’d want is available, but there are thousands of choices. In many of them, learning is self-paced, so scheduling is not a problem.
A whole bunch of them are free. The institution often offers both ‘auditing’ and ‘certification’ versions of the same course. The auditing version means you get to do all the video lessons, use the open discussion boards, and usually take any assessments and see your results — for free. People who need certification that they know something about a topic can pay to take the certification version where their completion and results on assessments are reported on request to whomever the student desires.
What are the drawbacks of MOOCs?
You won’t find MOOCs on highly specialized or technical information. MOOCs on first aid?Good choices abound (just search ‘mooc first aid’). MOOCs on how a lay person can appropriately choose and dose antibiotics? Good luck with that.
As with any information source, you’ve also got to consider potential biases. Why are these people going to the large expense and trouble to provide the course? Often the answer is a fairly clean: “Their mission is to educate.” “They are doing it to sell the certificates and offering a free version earns them good will for no extra cost.” “They want to interest good people in their field.”
Sometimes the course producers are trying to promote a particular point of view. With those, you need to pay attention to that and make wise choices out of what to take away from the course.
Motivation can be a problem. ‘Free’ saves your limited resources, yay! ‘Free’ also means you’ve got no skin in the game, as the saying goes. We silly humans pay more attention to things we’ve paid for than things that are free, even when their values are equal. (I’ve noticed several of the Harvard courses I’ve taken start out by pumping up your motivation. They ask you to predict if you’ll finish, anticipate obstacles to your success, and tell how you’ll overcome those obstacles. Those little mental tricks have been shown to increase completion rates.)
An example: My current MOOC
Right now I’m taking a course by Harvard. I like their courses; they know what the heck they’re talking about and how to teach. They’ve also got a good enough reputation they can get the top people in the world to sit down with them for interviews that turn into video lessons. Since Harvard has public education as one of its institutional missions, they’re good about offering a lot and keeping the bias level low.
My current MOOC is Lessons from Ebola: Preventing the Next Pandemic. I am auditing it for free, but could get a certificate of completion for $50. It’s mostly a set of interviews with people who were in the thick of the battle during the 2014ish Ebola outbreak that killed 10,000 in West Africa (and one in the U.S.). The title pretty much says it all: an exploration of how to do better with future pandemics.
The educator’s slant is obvious – he thinks a major key to avoiding pandemics is having a (not necessarily expensive but) solid foundation of health care even in rural areas. Nonetheless, he’s drawing out the experiences of the people who’ve ‘been there, done that’ rather than just propagandizing.
If I’d taken the course at the original start date, there would have been discussion forums. The course would have run four weeks, taking about 3 hrs time each week spread out however I liked. As that cycle is over, I’m just taking the video lessons and assessments however I like.
How do you find MOOCs?
It’s pretty tricky. You type “mooc *topic name*” in the search bar and hit enter. Or you go to one of the big providers and search their offerings. EdX, Coursera, and FutureLearn are my favorites.
Dive right in! We have the knowledge of the world in the palms of our hands; why would we be satisfied with just sharing pictures of our puppies? (Author’s note: Pictures of puppies as part of the online experience is strongly encouraged.)
Good article but it needs some links to MOOC’s. We need a little help in that direction please.