Back to School!

MOOCs. Or Massive Open Online Courses. It’s an acronym gaining popularity these days as many schools jump on the bandwagon of free courses to the masses. Robbie told me about Coursera.org many months ago and I’ve decided to sign up for a few courses this fall to test it out. I’m enrolled in:

• Statistics One
• Computing for Data Analysis
• Data Analysis

I do believe that “education for everyone” is important, and MOOCs allow anyone with an internet connection to enrol in courses without the expenses of tuition. What I’m not sure about are the credentials associated with these courses, or the effectiveness of administering a class to 100,000 students! Yes, that’s right- my Statistics One class has about 100,000 people enrolled. Wow!

But wait? Statistics and data analysis: Isn’t this what I do all the time? I did do my degrees in statistics, and I analyze data for a living, but after a while of not using the basics of stats, it’d be nice to do a refresher course. And the data analysis courses focus on R programming, with which I’m trying to re-familiarize myself. So we’ll see how it all goes, but I’m looking forward to it!

Author: rickohikes

Avid hiker, mountain lover and fitness enthusiast with insatiable wanderlust. Usually battling with an injury and my mental health, but I always persevere! View all posts by rickohikes