edX turns 2

So edX will be exactly two years old on May 15th. I'll be celebrating my own way, I guess by catching up on Astrophysics or revising for the Statistics final.

Veni, vedi, t-shirti.

So, what's edX for me? Quite a lot.

I jumped on the MOOC bandwagon in September 2013; well under a year ago, though the story begins in the summer of 2013. Having read a couple of pop-econ books and sort of got into my mind that I'd like, one day, to get some sort of formalish background in the subject, I was made aware that MIT had this OpenCourseWare thing going − and hey, what did you know, they had an Introduction to Microeconomics up! So I'd loaded up my smartphone with lectures, and watched them on my daily commute, and loved every single one of them.

(Now you people of MIT and edX, if you can convince Jon Gruber to host an economics MOOC, that'd be wonderful − Caltech's Principles of Microeconomics with Calculus, being way more austere and technically oriented, cannot fill in the role of an Econ 101 for everybody.)

So when I was done with 14.01SC and found my commute rather empty, I browsed through OCW and found a Fundamentals of Biology class, and thought hey, I've always regretted choosing math/physics over bio when picking a higher ed path (mostly because I wasn't properly aware that yes, you can study biology and not end up either in med school or working for Nestlé), so I started rooting around, until the big banners did get through to me that hey, a more up-to-date version of this course, with added homework material and a certificate at the end, was available through something called “edX”.

Boy did I know what I was getting into.

7.00x was great, so great that I signed up for Harvard's SPU27x (a smashing course that changed the way I envision food, and y'know, I'm French and all that) and UT Austin's Age of Globalization (thinking I would get a 14.01SC-like mathematically-minded analysis of globalization; sadly that was not to be). Then Berkeley's CS169 came along, and well, I'd wanted to find out what this Ruby on Rails thing was like for years. I signed up for MCB80.1x because neuroscience is this kind of hip thing right now, isn't it?

When that batch was over, I was hooked. I signed up to Ec1011x out of nostalgia for the MIT introduction to microeconomics, and this is to date the course I've worked the hardest on. I registered on Coursera to take the Epigenetics course that's just started − because there weren't any courses on edX to follow up to 7.00x. The idea that I might reorient my career towards a mix of computer science and biology/medicine started to grow in my mind, so I grew more methodical in my choices: I knew I needed a thorough statistics refresher so I picked Berkeley's Stat 2.1x (and later, 2.2x). The R statistical environment seemed like a good thing to learn − MIT's Analytics Edge course, here I am. Bioinformatics looked like the thing, so (there being nothing on edX) I took Peking U's course over on Coursera. And so on. (I tend to favour edX courses over Coursera / Udacity ones because I prefer the site layout, and more importantly because I feel that as a non-profit, it's intrinsically better − there is much less chance of seeing my profile data resold, or free stuff becoming paying, to start with.)

Eight months after signing up to my first MOOC, I am doing six courses in parallel, half of which through edX. I have 8 edX certificates to my name, two more are already secured and at least another one should be mine by the end of May. My edX dashboard, mixing past, current and future courses as it does, is overflowing with 20 entries (I am seriously considering forking OpenEdX on Github, refactoring the dashboard so it works for people with > 10 courses, and doing a pull request.) I brought back my old laser printer from the cellar so I could print out Immunology outlines and revise them on the bus. I plan my holidays around course schedules. I have started a blog about MOOCs. I generally finish each week mentally exhausted.

Less than a year into this MOOCing game, edX has already had a bigger impact on my life than, I don't know, any Web organization besides Google (to give some perspective, I've dropped Facebook to make more time for MOOCs, and feel all the better for it.)

All this to say, happy birthday edX!

(I'm unlikely to make it for the livestream, unfortunately, though I'll give it a try.)