Courses you are taking just now - (Dec/05/2012 )
Well, Interest groups seems to work again.
So, any news?
(my news is, sadly, I have so much work, there is no chance I could take some serious courses right now)
Same here Trof!
Has anybody done Mass Communication anytime. Am thinking of doing it.
Any helpful hints?
Last monday I thought I just look again what's on Coursera right now.
And ended joining Visual Perception and the Brain, Statistical Analysis of fMRI Data and Foundational Neuroscience for Perception and Action, which is a shorter version of the dreaded Medical Neuroscience, which I will definitely need to ditch this year, since I can't spend 12 weeks on such an intensive course and work at the same time.
Looking for "scratching head" variety of emoticons
CPRES: I have Aspergers so if you planned to make a subtle hint, it's definitely better not to use transcription of complicated ambiguous emoticons, or that emoticons alone, to be any chance I might get it ;)
(I'm almost sure I got this one right)
Whoa, the Visual Perception and the Brain course seem to be quite challenging. Not quite because the difficulty of the topic, but because the professor speaks just soooooooon long and boringly I can't keep my attention. I really can't, he spent 5 minutes explaining first slide, the most commonly know visual "illusion", but he is repeating stuff more than twice most of the time too. With a very relaxed voice.
And the other problem are the quiz questions, they are consisting of so complicated sentences, that I have to read them five times to understand what is it they try to say. And given that there were like three actual points made in the whole first week, main part of the quiz was "what is this course about". In a complicated way, so I choose the very first answer wrong, at least later they start asking about perception.
Still, 90 % on first attempt (100% on second) is fine considering I spent most of the third presentation watching cheetah webcam instead ;)
Now, I thought that two courses at the same time is simply not enough, so I took a third to that Understanding the Brain: The Neurobiology of Everyday Life. Somebody was mentioning it at the Visual perception forum.
Now honestly, the professor lecturing it is a really entusiastic person (or actually, she is pretty crazy ;) but with my biology background it is a bit like going back to the kindergarden. You will learn there that cells have "a factory" called mitochondria, and at that moment you know you are not exactly a target audience.
There is huge number of people there, all of them "MOOCing" here and "MOOCing" there, and happy to be MOOCing with other MOOCers.. it took me some time to understand what the gell is that abbreviation (it's massive open online course btw) and if anyone is interested in online courses, he should beware, that high concentration of people on the course forums using "MOOC" means that this class will definitelly be "massive" (i.e. popular, cool, playful, for dummies, simply said,.... what you can expect from a course targeted on very wide audience).
It's not that I'm critisizing it, I think it must be great stuff for everyone who just barely heard something about cell, or how it works, and it is made really "cool" way, with practical lab videos (did you ever seen someone holding a human spinal chord?) but personally, it takes me a lot of time to watch those videos, learning actually not much new.
Problem is, the professor surely has some very interesting overviews and just.. you know, like everyone who is expert in his field, it is different to hear him talk, than to read on wikipedia. But those very precious insights are in this, for me, mixed into loong and "dummie" stories about "what is an ion" just to be able to explain what action potential is, later in the module.
But why I mention it.. if you know someone who is absolutely new to biology field and wants to know about brain.. this is a right course for them. I mean, really, there was so much effort put in it to make this topic accessible and that is cool.