So the lectures are boring, you hate those JNTU textbooks more passionately than your old flame, and the grammatical errors in that All in One drive you up the wall just as fast as a Rebecca Black song (There are two of them now, by the way), no interesting projects like the fun ones you had in school, assignments mean copying from a class topper, all of it totaling to zero intellectual stimulation. Fret not, the internet, as always, comes up with a free solution to all your cognitive needs.
The MOOCs short for Massive Open Online Courses are web education platforms where everyone with an internet connection and time to sign up to create an account is welcome. Started to revolutionize higher education and create a more open learning environment, is becoming an integral part of any college students regular coursework. Mostly run by Non-Profit organizations, these courses encompass lectures by professors from Ivy leagues in addition to other top universities in the world, broken into short segments (they understand our fickle attention span and respect the mighty distractions of the Web), plus cool graphics to teach you the trickier/boring parts of a concept, plus exams and free certification (only if you want to take them) plus relevant, interesting assignments. Great offer or what? And like all best things in life and on the internet, these courses come free.
The variety of courses is vast, the teaching – simple, precise and effective. Reminders by the programs sent out when an assignment is due or a test is coming up and helpful resources. The students are from all over the world; so the interaction/group discussion boards are like YouTube’s comments section except helpful and useful (but with no less weird user names),project ideas are discussed, links shared, papers discerned, in short all the things we never do in our classes.
So here is a quick guide to the 4 most popular websites offering MOOCs:
1. EdX :
MIT and Harvard offers courses in subjects as diverse as physics, computer science, engineering, literature, ethics, law, medicine and economics. Each course’s home page provides an estimate of how many hours a week the course will require. Workloads vary widely. A Global History of Architecture, an M.I.T. class, requires at least five hours a week. Introduction to Computer Science, Harvard’s traditional introductory course, asks online students to complete eight problem sets, each of which will take 15 to 20 hours, along with two quizzes and a final project.
2. Coursera:
Two computer science professors at Stanford began this commercial venture in April 2012. The original partners were Stanford, Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Michigan. Seventeen months later, Coursera has partnerships with 84 universities and offers more than 400 courses. Coursera emphasizes interactivity. They organize in-person study groups in cities around the world, in addition to online discussion groups.
3. Udacity:
Udacity’s offerings are more limited, with a strong emphasis on science, math and computer science. There is also a sprinkling of business, psychology and design courses. About 30 courses are available. The courses do not start or end on specific dates and they do not follow a weekly pattern of lectures and assignments. They are entirely self-paced: You start whenever you like, and you work through the material as quickly or as slowly as you please.
https://www.udacity.com
4. Codecademy:
It is an online interactive platform that offers free coding classes in six different languages: programming languages like Python, PHP, jQuery, JavaScript, and Ruby, as well as markup languages including HTML and CSS. Codecademy also provides a forum where enthusiasts, beginners, and advanced coders can come together. There are four main topics: Web (HTML, CSS & JS), Ruby, Python.
www.codecademy.com
Special mentions-
Khan Academy:
www.khanacademy.org
While Khan Academy is originally meant to cater to the hungry (literally) masses of school children, you could give it a visit too. The beautiful, gripping graphics used in their videos, the simple and clear explanations and the wide variety of entertaining short courses to choose from like Fun with strings,String Theory or maybe Genetic for some, make for a weekend full of geek fun.
NPTEL:
While there is no interactive component to the lectures available by the IITs and IIScs collaboration, NPTEL to make their resources open and available to the nation obsessed with them, they are still pretty useful. Their courses seem to cover our portion for JNTU exams so, if there is something (or all of it) you missed in class, these lectures should get you up and running hours before that internal you’ve been dreading.
Grid Image courtesy: Wiredacademy
