19 - online learning

As I finished my “formal” education at the University of Liverpool in 2011, the MOOCs started to rise. It started with Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvigs “Introduction to A.I.” and Andrew Ngs “Machine Learning”. Both Sebastian and Andrew have started their own MOOC startups: Udacity and Coursera. Udacity is focused on Computer Science, Math, while Coursera has courses from totally different aspects of learning.

I have had wonderful learning experiences with both of them, and I’m really enjoying the Berklee college of music classes I have taken (and where I’ve learnt an enormous lot outside of my “regular” topics) and looking forward to the next one on improvisation.

I discussed the topic of online learning with a colleague today, and we both agreed that these initiatives (and of course the Khan academy) are wonderful for humanity - brining education to those who cannot afford it, who don’t have the “formal” prerequisites to attend college or university or those who don’t live in the correct region of the world.

In addition, it is just fantastic to being able to learn all the time. I will try to take at least one course every few months, and try to learn things that I normally wouldn’t look into. Others are into this as well - check out Degrees of Freedom for a day to day exploration of if it is possible to do an online BA with good reflections on the online learning experience.

From my experience with both an online Masters degree and the MOOCs - I can say that the quality of the MOOCs beat the teaching quality of the online university hands down… (Alas, they don’t give you credit points - yet)