Summer is coming

Traditionally, summertime is break-time; students go home or travel to see the world or do summer jobs, that kind of thing. Traditions are thick-skinned and find themselves replicated in the world of MOOCs, where they don't have much sense (apart from letting staff take summer break too, I suppose).

So, let's round up:

• Introduction to Statistics is finished. I eventually got 89% in the first course, 65% in the second course (that I started on the one-but-last week and caught up), and 96% in the final course on Inference. That doesn't make a statistician of me, but I feel armed to use simple statistics to read the methods part of papers, for instance, which was approximately my ambition in starting the cycle. Overall, maybe the 15 weeks of the course could have been condensed into 10 or even fewer; and maybe doing one big course instead of three small ones would've been better. But I'm not really complaining.
• I'm down to three MOOCs now: Exoplanets, Genomic Medicine, and Quantitative Biology.
• Exoplanets (Astrophysics course number 2 from ANU) is great, I love the enthusiasm of the professors and the mysterious planet Mog.
• Genomic Medicine Gets Personal from Georgetown University is… strange. It's got loads of hand-holding, each video lecture is accompanied by reams of annoying text telling us what the pedagogical objectives are, etc.; the difficulty level is also very low and I can't really say I've been learning much actual science so far. But on the other hand, it's quite interesting to hear doctors explain case studies, and relate how technological progress really impacts their job.
• Quantitative Biology Workshop is great, and has rekindled my interest in systems biology. The course suffers from its format: it's nearly impossible to do more than simple introductory work in 6 weeks while covering as many different techniques and tools. But still: after this week's visual neuroscience exercise, I was quite happy to have achieved it, and starting to like MATLAB. I really hope that the hints dropped that MIT are considering a Biology Xseries turn out to be correct: so far their courses have been stellar.

Next week it's just these three MOOCs, then (just in time for my one-week holiday in Wales) I'm starting a Coursera MOOC on The Emergence of Life which sounds great. That's the whole of the summer pretty much accounted for; the serious stuff begins again in September, with Scottish Independence, Data Analysis and Inference, Physiology, Neural Data Analysis, Dino 101, Explore Statistics with R all starting together − and I'm reconsidering taking Systems Biology at Mount Sinai too (with 7.QBW under my belt, it should be easier). I won't be able to do all of them justice, and some will have to go: I think KI's R course is currently the most likely to be dropped, but it's not likely to be enough. I think either one of Data Analysis and Neural Data, or one of Physiology and Systems Biology, or both, will have to go. But we'll see; there's no harm (or indeed, cost) in trying all of them for a week or so, then picking the ones I like most.