Continuing Education

A first-hand experience with online courses called MOOCs to develop new skill sets.

I have to admit, I breathed a huge sigh of relief when I submitted my last exam at the end of my second year; finally done with classes for good! Or so I thought… Between working on my thesis project and figuring out what I want to do when I eventually graduate, I began to realize that there were still some gaps in my skill sets that I needed to fill. I knew I didn’t want to register for a full-blown, semester-long course, and I had heard about some websites offering (free!) online courses on a variety of subject matters, so I decided to give those a try. These courses, known as massive open online courses or MOOCs, first started to come out in 2006, although it wasn’t until 2012 that they really took off in popularity. Having taken a few MOOCs now, I think these courses can be a great supplement for continuing education.

As the name suggests, MOOCs are open, online courses that aim to reach a large audience. Generally they offer video lectures, readings, and graded quizzes, problems sets or assignments. Often there are active discussion boards available for students to interact with each other and with teaching assistants and professors. Perhaps the most well-known providers in the US are Coursera, EdX, and Udacity. These sites partner with universities across the US, and even around the world, to offer classes on a wide array of topics, from introductory computer programming to entrepreneurship and management.

So far I have finished 3 courses statistics and programming in R and Python on Coursera and EdX. The courses have been fairly introductory in terms of content. While I have a basic understanding of how to use R, enough that I can run statistical tests on my data for instance, and the general concepts and syntax for writing a simple program with Python, I still have a ways to go before I would feel confident enough to put any of these skills on a resume. What I liked about the courses were that I could largely do it at my own pace and I could focus on the topics that were most relevant for me. Since I already had some background knowledge for the classes, I could skip the video lectures that review,l and jump straight to the new content. The assignments were a good chance to practice analyzing sample datasets and creating small programs.

One thing I noticed was that there was quite a bit of variability in terms of the quality of the assignments between courses, which wasn’t immediately obvious from the course syllabi. For instance, I took two “Introduction to Python Programming” courses simultaneously, each through a different university. Both covered more or less the same topics, but one course had fairly basic assignments testing the key concepts, while the other course had students apply the concepts to create interactive games. Although I received the same “Statement of Accomplishment” for both courses, I don’t feel like I learned the same amount from each course. I think this variability in quality and content is the biggest challenge of MOOCs, particularly for people who want to use these courses to show potential employers that they have acquired certain skills.

I plan on taking more in-depth courses in R and Python in the future, so I can’t comment yet on how good MOOCs are beyond the introductory level. Due to the size of these courses, students have limited interaction with the professors, so I can certainly see that beyond a certain point, a more traditional classroom setting could be more useful. On the other hand though, students from all over the world, and from all different backgrounds participate in these courses, so there can be some interesting discussions between students. I think these online courses can be great, low-commitment/low-cost way to be introduced to a new topic, but they certainly require self-motivation and discipline to finish and really learn the material; it took me several attempts at these courses before I finally decided to block out the time and commit to completing a course. I have a few ideas of projects/programs I want to write to help my research projects, so I’m hoping that the skills I’m learning and developing through these courses will help me bring these ideas to fruition.