All MOOCed Up

Hullo. This is a blog about MOOCs, or rather, about the MOOCs I take.

Why MOOCs?

This will be the topic of a full post, I believe, but generally: partly because I wanted to find out if at my advanced age (36) I still had the mental agility that led me through rather successful studies fifteen years ago, partly because I wanted to broaden my horizons.

What MOOCs?

I have taken eleven MOOCs to date (and passed ten of them; the remaining one I decided I couldn't care less about getting a certificate for, but it was still one of the more enjoyable courses I did take). Three more are still running, and I am registered for a further nine-ish. (All this in eight months; I don't believe in doing things halfway). I'll list them all in a minute, but generally they tend to fall in the following categories:

• Biology, medicine and life sciences − because I loved bio but dropped it after high school graduation, perhaps the worst mistake I ever did, or perhaps not;
• Computer science − because that's my day job and it's always good to learn new tricks;
• Data mining, data analysis, statistics, economics − because it helps me making sense of the world I live in;
• Any other things that strike my fancy.

Also, I favour interdisciplinary courses − e.g. bioinformatics, or statistics applied to genomics.

Where MOOCs?

Now that's a twofold question. I have taken, and am taking, MOOCs from both edX and Coursera (I am trying to fit a Udacity course into my schedule too; since it's self-paced it's the one that tends to slide). Mostly, I came to MOOCs after following a course at MIT OpenCourseWare, so I was naturally led to edX and that's where I took the vast majority of my classes (nine out of eleven finished courses so far).

In terms of institutions, that's been a mixed bunch. Only MIT, Harvard and Berkeley have I taken multiple courses from (I'm registered for a second course at Rice, but that's "only" the second part of the first course so doesn't really count). Generally, while last fall all courses I took were from US institutions, this year I'm doing courses from China, Australia and Europe as well. The US is still over-represented, but I guess it's only natural: they've basically invented MOOCs.

Who's MOOCing?

I'm a French software engineer (my full title is "Java Integration Team Leader" − means I do more presales, management and troubleshooting that actual coding nowadays, sadly). I have a fully European background, with British and Irish ancestry and a couple of years spent working in Sweden. In that respect I'm a little bit more cosmopolitan (and speak vastly better English) than your average Frenchman, but I wouldn't consider myself "well-traveled" by a long stretch. Education-wise, I'm a graduate from École Centrale de Nantes, where I majored in Engineering with a Computer Science specialization (nowadays ECN students are required to take two majors, one in an engineering field and one in a cross-disciplinary, "professional" subject, for instance project management, industrial design, etc.; but this didn't exist in my time).

Curriculum (ye olde virtual CV if you like)

Right, so, a quick rundown of the courses I've taken, am taking, and am registered for (at the time of this writing), in chronologicalish order:

Finished courses (unless specifically noted I have obtained a certificate of some sort for each, or the certificate is upcoming):

• edX/MIT − 7.00x Introduction to Biology, the Secret of Life
• edX/Harvard − SPU27x Science & Cooking: From Haute Cuisine to Soft Matter Science [didn't try for a certificate]
• edX/Harvard − MCB80.1x Fundamentals of Neuroscience part 1: the Electrical Properties of the Neuron
• edX/UT Austin − UT.3.01x Age of Globalization
• edX/UC Berkeley − CS169.1x Software as a Service part 1
• edX/UC Berkeley − CS168.2x Software as a Service part 2
• edX/Caltech − Ec1011x Principles of Economics with Calculus
• edX/UC Berkeley − Stat2.1x Introduction to Statistics part 1: Descriptive Statistics
• edX/Rice − BIOC372.1x Fundamentals of Immunology
• Coursera/Peking University − Bioinformatics: Introduction and Methods
• MongoDB/MongoDB − M102 MongoDB for DBAs

Current courses:

• Coursera/University of Copenhagen − Diabetes - a Global Challenge
• edX/ANU − ASTRO1x Greatest Unsolved Mysteries of the Universe
• edX/MIT − 15.071x The Analytics Edge
• edX/Harvard − PH525x Data Analysis for Genomics

Upcoming courses (imminent):

• Coursera/Melbourne University − Epigenetic Control of Gene Expression
• MongoDB/MongoDB − M202 MongoDB Advanced Deployment and Operations

Upcoming courses (further ahead):

• edX/MIT − MAS.S69x Big Data and Social Physics
• edX/ANU − ASTRO2x Exoplanets
• edX/Rice − BIOC372.2x Fundamentals of Immunology part 2
• edX/Georgetown − MEDX202-01 Genomic Medicine Gets Personal
• edX/MIT − 7.QBWx Quantitative Biology Workshop
• edX/Harvard − AT1x Musculoskeletal AnatomyX
• edX/KI − KIexploRx Explore Statistics with R

In addition, I'm registered for the "Intro to Hadoop and MapReduce" at Udacity, but can't quite fit it in the schedule so it keeps sliding; and I have started, but dropped after a week or two (for various reasons), a bioinformatics and an introduction to systems biology at Coursera (University of Toronto and Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai respectively), as well as M101J MongoDB for Java Developers at MongoDB (too little time, too much redundancy with the DBA course, and anyway I was just beta-testing it to decide if I should send some of my team at work to take it).

About this blog

So what should you expect from this blog? I hope to write down some notes about, in no particular order:

• each of the course I'm taking − the idea is to give my personal feeling about the course, how it fits in my "curriculum" such as it is (i.e. put it in relation with the other courses), etc.
• the various platforms − it's quite interesting to contrast edX and Coursera (we'll see about Udacity later!)
• the various types of certificates, and why get a certificate anyway?
• the MOOCs I'd like to see, the MOOCs I'd like to take
• how I organize my schedule, the various planners, mobile apps, etc.
• some generalities, whatever goes through my mind

While I try to be generally informative, let me be clear that this is a blog about my MOOCs and how I feel about them. Subjectivity is unavoidable.

Do not expect reviews such as:

This course is rubbish.

But do expect to see, occasionally, things like:

This course isn't what I was expecting. Given my current workload and energy level, it's better I drop it.

Anyway… enjoy.