I’m a great fan of MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) these days although when I first learned about the concept I didn’t like it much. I thought they would be mostly superficial and as many of them were/are self paced I thought it would be hard to finish them without deadlines. I probably have finished few of the many courses I have joined indeed.

However when Coursera started to become popular and having more courses I decided to give MOOCs a try again. And it was precisely when I fell in love with the concept. Given a little bit of effort now I was able to finish courses, gaining valuable knowledge that would be hard to get elsewhere. On Coursera (and other platforms like EdX) you can have access to high quality Courses on many topics, taught by top notch universities from all around the world.

Of course I also have some reservations about online courses. To me personally heavy math courses are hard to follow on the computer. I get distracted very easily when using computers, it’s just too easy to switch browser tabs and get lost on a long chain of links. At the other hand computer science or music courses are generally lighter and easier to follow, giving me good results.

MOOCs now are one of my main learning tools so I decided to stick to a routine of doing them every week. Sometimes I fall behind schedule due to college and heavy work load but I always try to watch all lectures and do as many tests as I can. School vacation has come, so I choose a few courses to do this July:

Jazz Improvisation

The World of the String Quartet

Write Like Mozart: An Introduction to Classical Music Composition

Functional Programming Principles in Scala

Practical Machine Learning