MOOC status, September edition

It's been a while since I've blogged; basically I've been busy with a lot of MOOCs on top of a lot of work. So, what's up?

First, let's do the numbers thing. I've racked up something like 25 course certificates in just about a year. Of these, 7 are verified. If we break them down by general topic, we have:

• statistics / data science: 9
• biology / medicine / life sciences: 7
• computer science / programming: 5
• astrophysics: 2
• economics: 2

(Of course, the categories are somewhat arbitrary: much of the data science thing could be classified as computer science; Introduction to Bioinformatics counts as CS but Quantitative Biology − which was about using Python and Matlab and R to analyse biological data − counts as biology. So don't take the count as an absolute, more as an indication of where I'm going.)

I'm currently embarked (with paid certificates and all) in two Coursera specializations: the Johns Hopkins Data Science one (which I'm halfway through already) and the Mount Sinai Systems Biology one (which I'm only three weeks into, out of about a year, all told). I guess I'll blog some more about these; generally speaking I'm finding the Data Science one pretty good once one gets to the meat of it (the introductory courses about R are… introductory, but the projects are okay; the more mathematical "statistical inference" course is quite good) and while Systems Biology course has a very tough start, it gets easier once we've hit stride. It's quite advanced, which is what I'm looking for, and that's pretty satisfactory.

Anyway, I'm currently enrolled in the following courses:

• Systems Biology
• Introductory Human Physiology (a great backgrounder for sys.bio.)
• Data analysis and statistical inference (to keep doing stats, but I'm really auditing only)
• Dinosaur paleobiology
• Fundamentals of Neuroscience part 2: Neurons and Networks

Also, I'm enrolled in JH's Statistical Inference, but it's a repeat from last month: then I didn't know if I could afford the time to complete this course so I did it "for play", without certification. This month I'm only redoing it with certification. So I did spend a few hours polishing up my course project, but that's really all.

And the future brings the following:

• Immunology part 2
• Astrophysics part 3: the violent universe
• Anatomy
• Neural data analysis
• Another 4 modules of Data Science (out of 9)
• Another 4 modules of Systems Biology (out of 5)

So… planning things out, we see a very hard last week of October (when some courses haven't quite finished and others have just started) with 10 courses altogether. But I guess I'll survive.