I have been pretty bad about not writing for the past several days. I have been very busy – what’s new? The Board of Trustees were here last week. I had to attend a retreat followup and several other meetings. Wellesley faculty did a great job talking about the MOOCs and other blended learning activities taking place at the College. Trustees were very impressed. I was so happy how the faculty acknowledged the partnership with LTS several times. Our staff members who are contributing to all of these collaborations deserve a lot of credit for their enthusiasm, creativity, hard work and patience.

I have been spending every waking moment of the past week thinking about a “competition” that I am part of. Well, it turns out that I was also dreaming about it and waking up in the middle of the night. As I may have mentioned, I am enrolled in a fantastic MOOC – The Analytics Edge. I have learned so much from it in terms of data handling techniques and statistical modeling. I have also learned the open source statistical programming language called R.  We have been given access to very interesting data sets for analysis ranging from Framingham Heart Study to data from Netflix as it related to the Netflix Prize.

We are learning a ton of modeling techniques (linear modeling, logistic regression, CART, random forest, clustering etc). I am happy to say that I am doing extremely well in the course and coding away in R on my Mac. Now you know where I am spending every available minute of my life! Full disclosure: I do spend a lot of time doing the real work!

However, we have a “competition” for 15% of the final grade. This is administered through Kaggle. By clicking on the competition link you can read all about it.  Basically, you are provided with both numerical and text data from NY Blog post articles and you have to develop a model that will predict the popularity of future articles. It is not an easy task as you can imagine. I am OK with where I am so far, but I can and should do far better than where I am. What this needs is a lot of experimentation with the models and the process to move up is slow and painful. I am willing to sweat it out, except I just can’t find enough time. Enough with excuses!

I just wanted to write this as a way to connect back to MOOCs and blended learning. I am loving it and learning so much from MOOCs. I also know that there are so many committed learners like me who are benefitting from these. As the controversy over this continues with some real issues such as long term financing of these efforts, I plan to take advantage of these while they last. I am loving it!

Hope to improve my score somewhat this weekend…