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I’ve done a lot of MOOCs in the last few weeks.  The vast majority of them rate “Meh” on the scale from “Ack!” to “HOLYCANIBITZ!”  At the two extremes, I feel like I should say a bit more about them, but here are a bunch of the Meh courses that are so forgettable that I don’t have much to comment on.

Course Title: English: Skills for Learning
Provider: The Open University via OpenLearn
Price: Free
Level: Introductory
Effort: Self-paced, 24 hours, estimated 8 weeks
Prerequisites: None
Completion awards: Statement of Participation, Open Badge

About the course:
This was a fair mix of instruction and practical exercises.  The information in this course is a very small subset of the information in The Good Study Guide, which I’ve previously mentioned.  The actual time on the course for me (taking the practical exercises very seriously) was about 6 hours.  If I didn’t have the Good Study Guide, it may have been a nice reference before beginning higher education.

 

Course title: Information Security
Provider: The Open University via OpenLearn
Price: Free
Level: Advanced
Effort: Self-paced, 10 hours
Prerequisites: None
Completion awards: Statement of Participation

About the course:
This course is listed as an advanced course, but I can’t for the life of me figure out how. Really, this could have been a much shorter MOOC than its realistic 90 minutes (most of which was spent choosing and listening to a podcast): CIA stands for Confidentiality, Integrity, and Accessibility, and listen to information security podcasts.  Job done.

 

Course Title: Good Brain, Bad Brain: Basics
Provider: University of Birmingham via FutureLearn
Price: Free
Level: Introductory
Effort: 9 hours over 3 weeks, commencing on set date
Prerequisites: None
Completion awards: Certificate of Achievement + Transcript (£59 + shipping) for completing 90% of course content, attempting all tests, with score of 70%, or Statement of Participation (£39 + shipping) for completing 50% of course content and attempting all tests

About the course:
Well, as the title of the course implies, this is very basic.  But it’s also very good.  It’s a concise and informative description of many of the functions and attributes of the brain.  And while very interesting, I don’t think my heart would be in it to complete the three-part series this course is a part of.  Also, I don’t think I could take it listening to those pronunciations and reading those spelling choices again.  It felt like every scientific word was deliberately pronounced wrong and spelled the least usual way.

 

Course Title: Introduction to Cyber Security
Provider: The Open University via FutureLearn
Price: Free
Level: Introductory
Effort: 24 hours over 8 weeks, commencing on set date
Prerequisites: None
Completion awards: Statement of Participation (£34 + shipping) for completing 50% of course content and attempting all tests

About the course:
This seems like it would be a good course for someone to start considering cyber-security. As these concepts are a part of my job, none of the information in it was new, and I completed the 8 week course in about three days, so maybe 10 hours or so. I like that this course doesn’t shy away from technical descriptions of digital encryption techniques, though it doesn’t describe any actual computational mechanism for any of the concepts. As it was most definitely not directed at me, I can only say that it seems good, and has all the points and more of the things I’d want to teach someone for a primer on the subject.

It needs to re-think its active learning portions, though.  Though this is an introductory course and is limited to digital information rather than general information, it’s far more useful to all learners than the “advanced” course on OpenLearn above.

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Course Title: Learn to Code for Data Analysis
Provider: The Open University via FutureLearn
Price: Free
Level: Introductory
Effort: 12 to 20 hours over 4 weeks, commencing on set date
Prerequisites: None
Completion awards: Statement of Participation (£19 + shipping) for completing 50% of course content

About the course:

I wanted to get my feet wet with some structured programming instruction, since I’m entirely self-taught up to now. (Well, not entirely. There was that half semester in Mr. Barton’s Pascal class where I tried to hack into the school network instead of listening to him drone on about methods of averaging.)  I also wanted to start learning Python.  This course seemed like a good fit.

Data Science or coding for Data Analysis is all the rage in MOOCs right now.  I found courses all over the place teaching essentially the same skills with various programming languages. Or one from Microsoft still insisting that Excel was up to the task.

This course only touches on the barest beginning concepts in coding.  It uses pre-defined contexts for Object-Oriented Programming, but doesn’t really describe how they work aside from feeding you the formula, “If you type what I type, you’ll get the answer I get.”  The syntax it teaches is almost exclusive to the problem domain of data analysis, and it doesn’t teach much outside that syntax.

One nice thing about the course is that it’s tough. It’s not one of those courses that says it takes 4 weeks, but is actually over in about four hours.  The first two weeks took me two or three hours a piece.  The third week took me nearly five hours.  The last week was well in excess of five hours, and could possibly have been ten.  It was an absolute slog, but it was very informative.  Again, though, mostly in the realm of data science.

The course information page says that the effort required is 3 hours per week, but once you join the course it says 5 hours per week.  So keep your eyes open if you’re intending to take it.

It’s not horribly helpful on its own.  It does teach about Python, and gave me enough familiarity with it to decide that I’m not a fan of many of its shortcomings. If you do need to learn coding for data analysis, this course won’t be enough to be helpful.  If you need to learn coding for reasons other than data analysis, this course won’t be enough to be helpful.  So it’s just a taster of Python in this specific context.

One odd thing of note was that there was a great number of facilitators on the course from the Open University to assist students, but they weren’t the most polite. They were a bit aggressive with any student suggesting something would be easier a different way, or that there was a shortcoming in either method or resource.  But they were helpful to those on the course, and there were a lot of them, more support than I’ve ever seen on a MOOC.

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This review will be a four-in-one.  It’s only fair to review them all together, since I took them all together in less than the time it normally takes for a single MOOC.

Course Title: Learning Online: Learning and Collaborating, Reflecting and Sharing, Managing Your Identity, and Searching and Researching
Provider: University of Leeds via FutureLearn
Price: Free
Level: Introductory
Effort: 3 hours over 2 weeks each, commencing on set date
Prerequisites: None
Completion awards: Certificate of Achievement (£39 + shipping) for completing 90% of course content and 70% on test scores, or Statement of Participation (£19 + shipping) for completing 50% of course content

About the course:

At the beginning of each of these courses, they beg people to keep in mind that the content is directed at 16 to 19 year old students still in compulsory education, on their way into University.  Since the entirety of the second course, Reflecting and Sharing, is devoted to telling students how to use social media, I somehow doubt the veracity of that claim.  The last thing a teenager needs to learn is how to use social media.

There is nearly no information in any of the four modules. The majority of chapters declare that they will teach something, then tell you to visit a website and look at help files, and then claim that they just taught you something.  I didn’t find anything in the combined courses that would be helpful to a teenager or anybody else learning online, but it did offer sage advice to use netiquette generally on the Internet.  But that’s just good advice.

Perhaps the worst aspect of the courses is that they want to crowd-source some collaborative experiences, but they just kind of throw the students in and hope one of them will be first.  The problem is that it then asks the students to evaluate what’s been done so far, when there is no so far.  It’s an empty sheet.  They should have seeded the activity with some starter data to get the ball rolling.

Most of the modules are simply bereft of content, but the third course, Managing Your Identity, has information in it about managing an online image that I simply disagree with.  In fact, all four courses make suggestions like using personal Facebook and Twitter accounts for scholastic and professional endeavours.

The only useful thing I got out of all four of the combined courses was that it motivated me to find Animaker. This is a great cloud app which allows you to create an animated video with all kinds of effects.  During the Reflecting and Sharing course, it was suggested that making and sharing videos of what you’ve learned is helpful.  Note that it didn’t suggest in what way it could possibly be helpful, it just said that it was.  It then told everybody to make a video about a few questions relating to Shakespeare.

Even though I viewed the assignment as pointless, I decided to join in.  (‘Join in’ is perhaps a misnomer, as I’m thus far the only person who’s done it.)  I feel like I should extend my best effort on these MOOCs even if I don’t see the value in it, or any particular step.  I’m glad I did.  While I still can’t imagine it will in any way come up in the course of studying a degree, I had a lot of fun making it, it turned out way better than I thought it might, and it was simple.  Once the course finishes for everybody else, I’ll scrub my personal details from it (despite the suggestions from the Managing Your Identity course), and link it below.

The total time for all four courses combined was about 7 hours, including learning how to create a video on my own.  The total amount of information I got out of the course was … Well, clearly not all Russell Group universities are alike.

2016/07/18 Edit: The course is over, so I’ve scrubbed personal details from the video presentation I did … Sort of.  Anyway, here’s the finished product:

shakespearevideo

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Even more pre-study studying!  This MOOC was the first I took on FutureLearn, an endeavour of the Open University which, so far, has been far superior to OpenLearn for me.  I have since taken a further two MOOCs there, and I’ve got at least six more in the pipe-line to finish before my course begins in October.

Course Title: Begin Robotics
Provider: University of Reading via FutureLearn
Price: Free
Level: Introductory
Effort: 12 hours over 4 weeks, commencing on set date
Prerequisites: None
Completion awards: Certificate of Achievement (£49 + shipping) for completing 90% of course content, or Statement of Participation (£39 + shipping) for completing 50% of course content

About the course:
This was my first foray into FutureLearn, and it was a great experience.

FutureLearn has all students start together on a course, but they can then progress at their own rate.  You can access all weeks’ content on the first day, and the course remains open for reference after the last day.  But by starting together, there’s a community of others along the way, with each article, discussion, video, or other step accompanied by its own forum thread. If you’re struggling with something, there’s probably someone else who is, too, and collaboration is available.  (This being about robotics, I spent most of my time sharing links to interesting solutions to challenges encountered in cybernetics.)

The first week of Begin Robotics introduced the glossary of terms used, a brief robotics timeline, and robotics simulations.  This last one captured the attention of most of the students.  A variety of robotics simulations have been programmed by the Reading team to allow you to interact with a virtual robot’s programming to test changes and observe results. The interactive nature of it was great for focusing learning, and the community of students comparing results helped even further.

The second week introduced sensors and actuators, for cybernetic observing and affecting the world around it.  Robotic ‘anatomy’ was a topic of discussion, now that sensors and actuators could give such discussion context.  More simulations followed, of course focused on utilising sensor information.

The third week was about robot-human interaction.  This included haptics, interface, psychology, and more.  The fourth week was about robotic learning, and artificial life.

The best thing about this course was its pacing, combined with its multi-track learning.  A beginner could start this course, and feel that they’ve learned a lot by the end of the course, with each week being more challenging.  A serious hobbyist could likewise start this course and feel that they’ve learned a lot by the end of the course.  The two would have learned vastly different things, and never been bored.

For beginners, though, they’ll possibly be left a bit wanting at the end of the course, however, as there’s no big, “Here’s how to start,” moment for them.  It’s just a lot of great information to keep in mind once they do start.  For hobbyists, though, there are a lot of general ideas and specific solutions to some real challenges, and very much worth the time effort.

The real time effort, however, is nowhere near the estimated 12 hours.  It was closer to five or six, and I completed it in four days or so.  I keep going back, however, to participate in the online discussions, as they’re quite good.