Final presidential debate is over and done with and the San Francisco Giants quietly came from behind to beat the Cardinals and the World Series is all set. Whether it is the debates or the Yankees losing to the Tigers, there is a lot of spinning going on. In case of politics, the spin rooms are there for this purpose. In sports, it is always the bad calls or the injuries; I guess you can throw money at acquiring all the talented players but you can’t buy their well being and health. I am sure we will all be watching the different polls and other sources such as Intrade during the next few days while also checking the World Series. When I was growing up, the election seasons in Sri Lanka and India were so much fun. There were so many outdoor events where the politicians came and gave fiery speeches, with a lot of warm up acts including music and dance. Finally, when the time came to announce the results, we were up all night listening to the short wave radio, sipping on coffee or chai (which was a predictor of which side you were on!), screaming hard when our parties won a seat and waking up all the neighbors. It was a lot of fun.

I continue to watch Nate Silver’s fivethirtyeight (I should say that I loved it much better the way it was before NY Times took over), Real Clear Politics and Intrade. I check these along with Facebook and Twitter before I even check my emails in the morning. Email is for the older people 🙂 I get so much out of my social media connections. As I have said before, those who I follow have already filtered the news for me so that when I get up, the virtual newspaper is waiting for me from all over the world. It is this concept that is also helping drive the online courses. So, I decided to go back to school to check ’em out.

If you have not already heard about the likes of edX, Coursera, Udacity etc. etc. which are being called MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses), it may be that you have been to some totally unplugged part of the world for the past several months. They are all over the place. The only way to get to know what these platforms have to offer is to dive deep. So I took the plunge a couple of weeks ago and decided to enroll in two classes that have very similar content – Python programming language. This way I can actually do a comparison and in the process, learn the language properly. I enrolled in “An Introduction to Interactive Programming in Python” taught by Joe Warren, Scott Rixner, John Greiner and Stephen Wong from Rice University in Coursera. I also enrolled in “MITx: 6.00x Introduction to Computer Science and Programming” taught by Eric Grimson from MIT. It uses Python as the language.

Bottom line: I am devoting a lot of time, mostly during weekends, to these classes because they require a lot of work & I love them both. The two platforms are pretty identical in terms of features, communication, and in the use of social media like tools. Literally thousands of others are in the same class and discussions forums are terrific ways to learn and contribute to questions from others. However, the contents are significantly different. The MIT course is much harder by comparison. the Coursera class is more fun and concentrates its efforts more on the mechanics of how to use the program to get things done while the MIT course weaves in some of the programming language fundamentals. I am getting a lot out of both.

What I love about them both is the way they are structured – short videos along with subtitles or scrolling transcripts on the side followed by short assignments. These assignments are automatically graded by computers. You can try them several times and also ask the system to show an answer if you give up. All of us have gone through the scenario where we make a silly mistake in one step and it screws up the rest of the answers. Here, you can avoid such scenarios easily. There are questions about the result of a programming snippet that they encourage you to first answer and if you get that wrong (by the way, edX gives you up to 50 tries) they ask you to run the code snippet through a Python interpreter to find the answer and learn where you went wrong. I thought these are very powerful paradigms for “learning” vs “testing”. Since you do sign an honor code, you are bound by certain rules such as not directly asking for answers through the discussion forums or checking the web etc. etc.

You can go back and rewind the lectures if you missed out on important concepts or even when you are going through a test, you can go back and refer to previous lectures. Whether this is the right mode to learn or the traditional face to face learning in a classroom is the right one is something that the experts will continue to debate. I think that the flexibility that this mode provides is very powerful. But more importantly, this is customizable by the learner and leraning style which has parallel  in the  “in class” experience. MIT class, for example, is the same class that all MIT students take, so its level is pretty high. As a result, many drop out after a first few lectures, but those who persist can learn the content in ways that suits them – listen to the lectures multiple times, converse with the others in the forum (which is now hundreds compared to a handful), use additional learning materials posted in the course area etc. etc. Frankly, the fact that there is no perceived “competition” (at least not yet) for grades, collaboration and cooperation takes place very differently in these spaces.

These classes have a couple of different modes – if you are serious about them and want to stick to deadlines etc. you may be rewarded with a certificate. Or, you can be a leisurely learner. I am trying hard to keep up with the deadlines for problem sets and exams.

After I finish these two classes, I will enroll in classes beyond my comfort zone. Perhaps “A History of the World since 1300” or “A Beginner’s Guide to Irrational Behavior”  or “PH207x: Health in Numbers: Quantitative Methods in Clinical & Public Health Research”

I strongly encourage you to experience these systems to form your own opinions. No one knows where the MOOCs will be in the future. The production costs of these classes are enormous, so, how long would the institutions be able to offer them for free remains a question. Branding is another important question everyone is struggling with – how would the real world treat a certificate from a MOOC in comparison to grades from a regular residential program. Like everything else, over time, all of these will shake out. My own prediction is that these will become a serious component of learning as we move forward.

By the way, talking about learning style… You know how impatient I am. So far, in both classes, I speed up the lectures by 1.25 or 1.5 times the regular speed! I love it and it works for me. I am sure that there are many that are slowing down the lectures to suit their needs. We can debate the merits of this, but this adaptability is a beautiful thing.