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Coursera and other online platforms are providing quality education for free for the needful. Classrooms have come to the doorstep and have made the learning a wonderful experience with awesome content
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MOOC
stands for Massive Open Online Course. MOOC revolutionizes how the
education system is going to be in the near future. MOOC provides a
platform to enable a kind of distance education.
Just imagine - the best professors from the best universities (read MIT,
Princeton, Cambridge etc) can teach full time courses on the Internet -
completely free. A course taught at classroom can accommodate say max of
400 students - but the same course when taught online can accommodate -
literally millions and not just students but anybody having access to
Internet.
I was literally blown away after watching a TED video by Daphne Koller on What we're learning from online education?
Daphne a PhD by qualification, a Standord professor by occupation - is on a noble endeavor of
bringing the college experience to the doorstep for anyone which is
interested in learning through her startup - Coursera.
To give the best education from the best instructors
from the best universities for free
- this is a in a nutshell is the mantra of Coursera.org
There are already many quality learning content available online as part of Youtube, iTunes universities, books etc - but what's missing is an "education platform". Top schools and universities have been putting content on Youtbue - but where is the impact. At best you can view these videos at leisure, but there is no "feedback", no mechanism to track "progress", no "tests", no "grading", no "collaboration" etc
Coursera's platform bridges this gap and supports the other vital aspect of the classroom: tests and assignments that reinforce learning.Moreover the quality of content on Coursera is extremely high. This I am speaking from experience. Just look at the kind of courses offered. I have listed some of them below:
- Software Engineering for SaaS by University of California, Berkeley. (using tech tools like RoR, Git, HTML5, CSS3, Rspec, Cucumber, Agile etc)
- Algorithms by Princeton University
- Introduction to Mathematical Thinking by Standford University
- Introduction to Data Science by University of Washington
- Machine
Learning by University of Washington
- Functional Programming in Scala by Martin Odersky
- etc etc
I have just listed some of the courses related to Software, but there are many course spanning all fields of educations be it healthcare, security, science, games, philosophy etc.
Thank you Daphne for the great work.
I have already joined couple of them - and I'm enjoying them.
What course are you joining?
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