I had a couple of pretty busy weeks. I traveled to Washington DC for a gathering of fellow CIOs from merged IT-Library organizations. Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) had organized this and a few of us from small liberal arts colleges gathered to discuss organizational makeup, challenges now and going forward. It was a very useful exercise and we all had a great time. There were the usual mixture of agreements and disagreements. My flights were delayed in both directions, which was annoying, but I think this has become the norm. Talking about delays being the norm, it happened again with my doctor who I went to see my physical. He is such a nice person that it didn’t matter much.

The MOOC controversy continues – “After Setbacks, Online Courses are Rethought” and “Speaking Up for the Creditless MOOC” are worthy of reading if you are interested. Wellesley’s first MOOC,  “Introduction to Human Evolution” by Adam van Arsdale, will be wrapping up shortly and there has been a constant flow of rave reviews about the course from the students in this class.

I completed my third MOOC – “Introduction to Biology – Secret of Life” taught by Eric Lander. As I have written before, I learned so much in the class and I thoroughly enjoyed it though it was a hard class. I have signed up for my next class “Relativity and Astrophysics” which is slated to begin in February. I am looking forward to it.

Right from the beginning I was hooked! I set aside several hours on weekends for the course. It took up a fair amount of my time, but I did not mind. I was thoroughly enjoying the lectures. The videos presented were recorded in the actual MIT class offered earlier. Eric Lander was not only talking about the subject matter, but he was bringing in some “stories”, especially ones involving his own research and other great scientists with whom he had either collaborated or knew personally. This made everything so much more personal and interesting. In a few cases, it appeared that when students asked questions, his answers were way too complicated and not directly answering the question.

The amount of material covered in the class was enormous. Since it is an introductory biology class and he was touching on so many different subject areas, there was a fair amount of black-boxing. For example, when he was discussing the cell growth, division and replication to explain how cancer forms, he would say things like “There are a whole bunch of these adapter proteins.” One of them is called Grb2.  “And who cares if it is called Grb2 or not?”, or “The goal is not to memorize these things”. The the way these subject matters were presented was very functional. The process of  cell growth could still be understood without knowing the details of what is the name of each of the proteins that are involved in each step. Of course, there were a lot of additional resources and “deep dives” that were available to anyone who wanted to branch off and learn more deeply about these.

Several hands on tools were introduced in the class such as fold.it, a protein folding online “game”,  integrative genomics viewer, virtual genetics lab and JMOL for molecular visualization. At least for me, these tools made it easy to understand the concepts in ways that otherwise would have taken forever.

As you can tell, I enjoyed it and scored really well, though I made some silly mistakes that cost some valuable points.

I am looking forward to the holidays. This year, we will be spending the time at home because our travel plans didn’t materialize due to the cost of travel. This gives me time to catch up on some of the things and just relax, meet with friends and enjoy some good food and drinks. All of this actually began over the past weekend and continues!

I wish you all very happy holidays and thanks for following my blog.  See you next year!