How it started

Nine years ago I received the message below, which would spark a spiral of learning in the coming years and eventually change my career, although I didn't know that at the time.

6.00x Course Team noreply@edx.org via mail50.us1.rsgsv.net 

Sep 26, 2012, 7:47 PM

to me

 

Dear Juan Carlos Cabrejas,

Welcome to 6.00x: Introduction to Computer Science and Programming! When the course begins on Monday (10/1), you will be joining tens of thousands of other students from around the world in MIT's newest online course. In addition to learning the basics of computer programming in Python, and the fundamentals of computation, you will get hands-on experience implementing a variety of Python programs and using powerful Python libraries.

The course website is available starting today! We invite you to visit

https://www.edx.org/courses/MITx/6.00x/2012_Fall/about

Click on the "View Courseware" link to gain access to the course syllabus, calendar and other materials. Starting on October 1, there will be new lecture videos and homework assignments posted every Monday at 10:00 AM EST. There will be two midterm exams and one final exam; you can find more information about these by visiting the course website.

Our primary communication channel will be the website’s interactive forum, where students and staff will get to contribute to an ongoing discussion of the material. The forum will go live next Monday at 10:00 AM EST. Meanwhile, you can familiarize yourself with the guidelines for the discussion forum by visiting the course webpage.

We look forward to a great semester with you!

Eric, John, Chris and the 6.00x Course Team

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Learner story - featured in edx

I have been thinking for a while now about writing an article in LinkedIn about changing careers, and this could probably be the final trigger to do it. Really honoured to be featured in the front page of the edx blog page. And happy to help as well, which was the reason why I submitted the story in the first place. Just imagine someone is inspired by this to start learning something. How cool is that? 

You can read the mini article here and browse courses here, here, here or here to name just a few platforms.

The Iron Man strategy to complete MOOCs

I would like to share a strategy which has worked very well with me for the last 15 months and allowed me to finish a considerable amount of MOOCs. I call it the Iron Man strategy and it is hard indeed. But very simple to explain. Don´t watch TV. Use the time instead to complete a MOOC, one at a time. And why is it called Iron Man strategy? Well, because you are only allowed to watch TV while doing the ironing! 

The year of the MOOCs

Today I took the exam of the fifth #MOOC I have completed in the last year. Even I am surprised of how this last year has evolved. There was no plan behind this, it simply started as a birthday present from my wife in the form of additional "time off" to take one course from MITx and it quickly developed into an addiction, if such a thing makes sense when it come to education.

I was initially attracted to #edx.org through the names of MIT and Harvard. Would I be up to the challenge? Well, it turns out I did well enough on #6.00x for me to be very satisfied. Lucky this did not exist at the time I was at college. I would have struggled with the lectures and the MOOCs :-)

After #MITx's 6.00x (Oct to Jan) I was hooked on MOOCs, so I went on to complete a couple more courses on a different platform, #Coursera. These were Georgia Tech's Computational Photography (April - May) and IIT Delhi's Web Intelligence and Big Data (April - June) before taking the highly acclaimed #Machine Learning from Stanford´s Prof. Andrew Ng , which offered a superb learning experience.

After the Summer break, I have completed Data Mining with Weka, from the Waikato University, which makes the fifth one, plus a couple of others I have audited for some lessons.

All in all I have invested a significant amount of my time on education through MOOCs in the last twelve months. I took much fewer photos this year, I read fewer newspapers and blogs, watched much fewer movies and, in exchange, I focused on something I am convinced it will have a long time benefit, my education. The courses were heavily weighted towards Computer Science, which meant challenging programming assignments beside simply watching the videos and reading additional information.

So what´s next? Well, there is a course about Semantic Web offered by the HPI which caught my eye because of something related to work. Plus there is the XSeries offered by MITx, which I will definitely endeavour to follow. Plus so many others that, again, the problem is making up your mind which one to take. Something I learned this last year is that two MOOCs at a time is one too many for me (tried Harvardx CS50x at the same time as MITx 6.00x and did not work since both demand quite a bit of time, plus I had trouble with Web Intelligence, Computational Photography and Machine Learning partly overlapping for some weeks).

So this was my particular year of the MOOCs. Very enjoyable...

Visiting MIT...

On the way back to the airport a few days later, and as you can see from the photo above, I had a bit more luck with the weather. I stopped by in Cambridge once more, as Prof. John Guttag at MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory had kindly made time on his schedule to meet me. We talked briefly about my experience taking the 6.00x course and he gave me a signed copy of the Spring version of his book, the one which includes me in the acknowledgements.

Just by chance, I had bought the big book "The Human Face of Big Data" a few days earlier in Hartford (seriously, it´s really big and won´t fit on my shelves!). John Guttag and fellow researcher Collin Stultz appear in this book and their photo was actually taken in the Stata Center. As I needed a photo for an internal newsletter from my company, John agreed to have one taken and he suggested that we do it in the same spot as the one in the book. Quite memorable!

Finally, I also found time to visit the edX offices, just a few hundred meters away. I just showed up to the entrance and asked to see one of the staff, whose name I could remember from the forum discussions. Luckily she was there and, surprised as she was, she took some time to show me the offices and talk about MOOCs and the challenges they are facing. All in all, a great experience before rushing to the airport for my flight back home.

I am very grateful for the effort that goes into making these courses freely available, so when edX asked for stories from students, I sent mine hoping it would be useful. I don´t usually post photos of myself, but I felt this was worth it and I am very happy that my story has been featured on their facebook page.

If you have not done it yet, have a look at edx.org or any other of the platforms offering MOOCs. You will be stunned by the quality of the courses.

Python & applying knowledge gained in an MOOC

I recently saw this at a school biology lab here in Berlin. When I read the (very) old label and noticed that these were two pythons, I took my blackberry and snapped the photo above. There was a teacher next to me so, rather apologetically, I explained that I had recently finished a programming course and that the name of the language was Python! She smiled at me and probably thought I am nuts. Maybe. Maybe not.

But I actually wanted to write about something else today. There is a lot of hype about MOOC´s and all the stuff that can be learnt these days for free. But learning without applying your knowledge later is sort of useless. OK, you get a certificate (and apparently mine from +edX will be ready tomorrow!), but that is not the whole point of doing a course, is it? In contrast, most of what I read about Raspberry Pi´s are actual applications of what people are doing with it. You don´t buy a Pi just to tick a box of cool things to own, but because you have a project in your mind and you are itching to get started with it. It should be the same with programming. 

I am happy to say that I have already applied some of what I learnt on 6.00x at work. I have developed a simple search tool which actually makes life in my department a bit easier. It allows to search a huge repository of documents from an old system in a way which was not possible before. It is not rocket science, and surely many a professional programmer would find ways to do this in quicker and more effective ways. But it works and it reduces search times from hours and hours to a few minutes. And I have the feeling this is just the start. I recently came across this book and, time permitting, I already have something else in my mind. Again, it is not about learning Python for the sake of learning. It is what we can now do. And I have a feeling it is a lot that we can do!

So how are you applying the knowledge gained from whatever latest MOOC you took?


PS: I know, Python did not get its name because of the animals...