2012: Year of the MOOCs, Massive Open Online Courses.

from universities literally around the planet for students signing up from anywhere, that I had a terrible time deciding which to get my own feet wet with in 2013.

For those who haven't checked them out yet, MOOCs are mostly FREE and are noncredit. And extremely easy to sign up for (the "massive"). Courses range from beginner with no suggested requirement to post-grad level. They can demand little beyond listening to a few lectures (broken into 8-12 minute chunks) and taking quizzes (or not) or be fairly demanding, with class participation, writing assignments, and final exams. There are a bunch in health and information technology/computers. Some offer certificates (NOT transferable college credits) after final exams. I'm quite sure many would qualify for  CMT continuing ed credits.

Below is a link to an article from the NY Times on them which includes various MOOC class offering sites.

(Ultimately I chose one that starts in February from edX.org, the site for MOOCs from Harvard, MIT, UC Berkeley, and Georgetown, "Challenges of Global Poverty" from MIT. It recommends familiarity with statistics, and mine is long gone, so I chose a beginner stats course that starts a bit earlier from Berkeley that focuses on understanding and doesn't require memorizing formulas or special assignments. I want this to be fun.)

Excerpt from Times article: 

"WHAT IS A MOOC ANYWAY?

Traditional online courses charge tuition, carry credit and limit enrollment to a few dozen to ensure interaction with instructors. The MOOC, on the other hand, is usually free, credit-less and, well, massive.

Because anyone with an Internet connection can enroll, faculty can’t possibly respond to students individually. So the course design — how material is presented and the interactivity — counts for a lot. As do fellow students. Classmates may lean on one another in study groups organized in their towns, in online forums or, the prickly part, for grading work.

The evolving form knits together education, entertainment (think gaming) and social networking. Unlike its antecedent, open courseware — usually written materials or videotapes of lectures that make you feel as if you’re spying on a class from the back of the room — the MOOC is a full course made with you in mind.

The medium is still the lecture. Thanks to Khan Academy’s free archive of snappy instructional videos, MOOC makers have gotten the memo on the benefit of brevity: 8 to 12 minutes is typical. Then — this is key — videos pause perhaps twice for a quiz to make sure you understand the material or, in computer programming, to let you write code. Feedback is electronic. Teaching assistants may monitor discussion boards. There may be homework and a final exam.

The MOOC certainly presents challenges. Can learning be scaled up this much? Grading is imperfect, especially for nontechnical subjects. Cheating is a reality. “We found groups of 20 people in a course submitting identical homework,” says David Patterson, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who teaches software engineering, in a tone of disbelief at such blatant copying; Udacity and edX now offer proctored exams.

Some students are also ill prepared for the university-level work. And few stick with it. “Signing up for a class is a lightweight process,” says Dr. Ng. It might take just five minutes, assuming you spend two devising a stylish user name. Only 46,000 attempted the first assignment in Dr. Ng’s course on machine learning last fall. In the end, he says, 13,000 completed the class and earned a certificate — from him, not Stanford.

That’s still a lot of students. The shimmery hope is that free courses can bring the best education in the world to the most remote corners of the planet, help people in their careers, and expand intellectual and personal networks. Three-quarters of those who took Dr. Patterson’s “Software as a Service” last winter on Coursera (it’s now on edX) were from outside the United States, though the opposite was true of a course on circuits and electronics piloted last spring by Dr. Agarwal. But both attracted highly educated students and both reported that over 70 percent had degrees (more than a third had graduate degrees). And in a vote of confidence in the form, students in both overwhelmingly endorsed the quality of the course: 63 percent who completed Dr. Agarwal’s course as well as a similar one on campus found the MOOC better; 36 percent found it comparable; 1 percent, worse."

Link to the whole thing, with lots of good information, below. (I didn't know when I signed up that, "EdX’s M.I.T. roots show in its staff’s geeky passion for building and testing online tools." They collect student "clicks" to analyze what's working.)