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Course Title: How to Code – Systematic Program Design
Provider: University of British Colombia via edX
Price: Free
Level: Introductory
Effort: 5 hours per week, 5 weeks per course, 3 courses – about 75 hours
Prerequisites: None
Completion awards: Verified Certificate for each of the three courses (USD$49 or $50, depending on which link you click on), automatically awarded XSeries Certificate if all three Verified Certificates are awarded

About the course:
Go.  Sign up now.  I don’t care if you hate computers or have been programming professionally for years.  This is an amazing series and getting through the course is highly rewarding.

There’s a lot to say about this series.  For one thing, the level of effort required is very real.  It took me three or four weeks to get through all three courses, and I was staying up late for hours on end.  And I’m considering working through it all again so that I retain it longer.

Beyond that, let’s start with the concept.  The SPD course introduces the idea of designing a computer programme as an abstraction layer between the solution and the coding.  It’s a tool for producing a template for a solution which is orthogonal to the language being used.  And it’s genius.

SPD takes this method from the How To Design Programs book, by Matthias Felleisen, Robert Bruce Findler, Matthew Flatt, and Shriram Krishnamurthi.  It focuses on data-driven programme design, which was a new concept for me.  You define data, which informs what can be done with it, which influences function design, and so on.  By the end of the course, there were still experienced code-jockeys decrying the lack of well-named variables, without realising that when you’ve clearly defined your data and what it can and can not represent, it’s irrelevant. You can’t possibly be confused what “variable c” means when you’ve stated that the only valid data type for variable c is degrees Celsius.  If you’re an old hand at programming and haven’t used data-driven programme design before, it’s worth a look to evaluate why you do things the way you do them.

It uses its own beginner language that isn’t outrageously useful outside educational context.  It is Turing complete, but it’s a bit of a pain to use in real situations.  Its environment is also quite slow.  The reasons for not using a commercially viable language are discussed early on, and I wholeheartedly embrace those reasons.

By the end of the first course, you’re already designing your own programmes using the data-driven model. It was around this point that I realised the beauty of defining the data and describing functions based on it.  If data X has properties Y and Z, then I can write functions for X that read and/or modify Y and Z, either by itself, or in relation to other data.  It dove-tails beautifully with object-oriented programming, but the course doesn’t cover application of its high-level theories to low-level techniques with other languages.  (However, the ProgramByDesign project is also working on How to Design Classes which features at least a subset of Java.)

Professor Gregor Kiczales is one of the best technical instructors I’ve ever seen, and I used to do that professionally.  His focus is on getting the programme design right, so that the code can flow naturally from that design.

It is an amazing foundation for how to approach programming design.  Playing with Scratch, I didn’t imagine I could possibly apply the HtDP principles to such a strange and specific programming environment.  However, I ran into a few bumps so I broke out data definitions and templating, and solved the problems in minutes. (Note: Never underestimate the power of testing well-chosen and well-defined examples.)

Anyway.  Just sign up.  Sure, it’s 50 to 80 hours out of your life, but it re-introduces you to the digital world in a way which will undoubtedly increase your comfort with it.

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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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A few weeks ago when I reviewed OpenLearn’s Succeed With Maths MOOCs, I said that there was a much better option out there.

Course Title: Various, depending on what you want to learn
Provider: Khan Academy
Price: Free
Level: Introductory, Intermediate, Advanced
Effort: Self-paced
Prerequisites: None
Completion awards: In-site badges

About the course:

Khan Academy says they’re not a MOOC.  They’re Massive in intake, Open in philosophy, Online by nature … So that just leaves Courses.  They say they’re not a MOOC since they don’t have structured, led courses with beginnings and ends.  But they do have courses.  In fact, they have several different flavours of courses.  They have subjects, missions, skills, and … well, some kind of skill grouping that isn’t explicitly defined.  It’s in the vein of a cMOOC, rather than an xMOOC.

You just drop in, and drop out, and study what you need to study.  I’m not sure if the instruction is really as fantastic as I think it is, or if it’s just presented in a way that my unique brain makeup interprets and absorbs well, but it’s fantastic for me.

In junior high school, I had a teacher who held me back from the next year’s advanced maths class, because while I’d performed well in exams, I didn’t do any of the coursework. Then in high school another teacher noticed that the rest of the class asked me to re-teach what he’d finished lecturing about every day.  His response was to force be back up into advanced maths the following year.  The result was that I skipped trigonometry entirely.

I’ve struggled through with trigonometric functions, having taught myself a few of the rules, and then using the basic blocks I knew to struggle through more advanced issues, by combining those blocks with each other or with basic algebra.  But I’ve always felt like there was a huge gap in my learning because of this, and I’ve been a little ashamed of my skills in mathematics because of that gap.  I had tried multiple books over the years to fill that gap, but didn’t really feel like it got me anywhere.

Khan Academy filled that gap within 12 days.  In fact, what it did is show me in elegant, logical steps that were effortless to take in, that I’d gotten it right all along.  But now I don’t have to re-work and re-invent trigonometry each time I tackle it; they’ve made the knowledge much more accessible to me.

My five-year-old son was very excited to watch my progress, and see the badges I was getting, and how my avatar was growing.  He asked me to set him up an account, too.  I did, thinking he’d just log on, have a look, and log off.  Joke’s on me.

He goes on for about an hour a day, just to play.  By play, I mean take quizzes, work through practice questions, watch videos on new maths concepts … An hour a day.  And what has he learned?

He started out doing addition within the 1-20 range, and subtracting numbers in the 1-10 range.  He has now mastered two-digit addition and subtraction, is working on three-digit, can read an analog clock with or without numbers, can read information from bar graphs and solve story problems using two bar graphs, is better at understanding the operand required from story problems than I am, and is starting on geometric principles meant for 7 to 9 year olds.  In eight days.

He advanced so much, that his school literally started sending home worksheets for the next year’s maths.  Which is something that they said at the beginning of the year that they would not do under any circumstances.  (We had called for a meeting with his teacher and the head of English Learning for his school to discuss advanced reading for him, and it was stated then that their maths curriculum was designed in such a way that they would never allow students to use maths resources from advanced years. Which upset us, but didn’t think would become an actual issue.)

In addition to maths, you can study programming, history, music, economics … A lot of things. It is an amazing self-education tool and well worth any time invested in it.

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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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As with the previous MOOC review, I had signed up to these courses to help prepare myself for university study.  When doing this, I’m hoping for useful content, but am willing to walk away with just reinforcing good study habits, as well.  These didn’t tick either box.

Course Title: Succeed with maths – Part 1, Succeed with maths – Part 2
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:
I didn’t honestly get very far into the first course before I realised that this was an especially remedial maths course.  I hadn’t really expected the first one to be too much more involved, so I just took the quizzes to make certain I wasn’t going to be leaving a gap in my knowledge, and got through it.

The second course, though, I thought would at least have some kind of intermediary maths in it.  Instead, it advances to the level of reading graphs.

The problem with MOOCs like this is that anybody who is disciplined, organised, and educated enough to be able to learn from such a MOOC has already far outstripped the content of this MOOC.  This is to say that there is essentially a non-existent target group for this MOOC.  Here’s my Venn Diagram describing this:
Success with maths Target Students

[Source: My arse (2016)]

This makes it a useless course.  As a result, the content is useless, and it’s useless to use to develop study habits.

Thankfully, there ARE solutions out there.  One of the solutions is so fantastic that it’s shifted a portion of my study plan for my degree.  I’ll review this other solution at a later date.

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As I stated in my last post, I’ve been using free MOOC resources to prepare for university-level learning.  I logically thought this free course would be a good place to start.  Here’s my review of it:

Course title: Taking Your First Steps Into Higher Education
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 course draws material and inspiration from the Open University’s Access modules, Y031, Y032, and Y033 for content on Arts & Humanities, Social Sciences, and STEM subjects, respectively.  The full Access modules give a small and non-threatening taste of higher education study, to help you determine if it’s right for you.  This MOOC is, then, really a taster course for a taster module.  In theory, it’s meant to help you evaluate which of the general subject types you might like to study, and if you think you might enjoy (or be capable of) studying in higher education.

In reality, it comes off more like a commercial for the Open University, but one with its heart firmly in the right place.  It does do what it says it will do, but it’s a bit rhetorical in that it assumes and then insists that the answer is always that if you’re at all interested, then its right for you, and tries to convince you of this.  But this is only for higher education in general.  It’s a bit of a cheerleading exercise rather than an objective view giving both positive and negative views.

It does an excellent job of preparing those who have not studied at higher levels for a fundamental shift in learning philosophy, the change of focus from led instruction to self study.  It doesn’t do much for giving you tools for overcoming this shift, but does impress its importance.

The arts and humanities discussion was the most surprising for me.  I came into this module with a prejudice against the very nature of art history, evaluation, and appreciation. But within just a few short questions, Dr. John Butcher had shifted my world in response to art, particularly contemporary art. He had also done it in the section on poetry evaluation. I was able to access a poem I’d studied earlier and instantly recognise values in it I had never seen before, found an obvious meaning I’d never considered, and even uncovered additional subtext relative to modern philosophy that was shouting out for me to share my experiences with others.

The social studies sections were just the opposite.  Dr. Jonathan Hughes felt patronising and dismissive in his lecture. I wasn’t at all surprised to learn that he was the lead on the project for this MOOC, with its rhetorical approach and cheerleader enthusiasm. It’s a terrible shame, too, because I’m deeply passionate about social sciences, particularly social psychology and development.  But he would repeatedly invite discussion, only to then give the ‘right’ answer. At one point, he invited the student to compare their personal answers to his … Only to have his answers (and not even his exact answers, but a specific interpretation of them) be the basis for quiz questions later.  I found it quite insulting.

Finishing things up with reliable STEM subjects was a relief.  Dr. Laura Hills certainly knew how to lecture and prepare learning materials. Her approach quickly invited independent thought and provided the confidence (to me at least) that I felt the course should have been promoting all along.

Over all, I feel that the MOOC lacked substance of useful content unless you A) want to go to university, and B) don’t know if you’d rather take humanities, social sciences, or STEM subjects. Which should bring the total number of humans on this planet who would actually find the course useful to … Zero? Nobody wants to go to university without at least having an idea of what kind of studies they want to pursue. Sure, they might not be able to decide between two or three degrees, but to have no clue?  Whatever.

I do feel that I gained a lot of personal insight from this however, especially thanks to the amazing questions from Dr. Butcher.  It just wasn’t the insight I was expecting.  The warnings about the pitfalls of self study and few other revelations scattered throughout the sections are useful and appreciated, and will be remembered, but possibly not at the cost of the 10 real hours or so I spent with it.