MOOCS

Hello everybody!

Have you ever heard what the MOOCs is? It sounds like a cow coughing on a piece of grass, isn't it? 😃 Before, I also did not know about such a platform. Perhaps, I would be rather skeptical about this service, if I found out about it earlier. But, thanks to my tutor and her course at the university, I learned a lot about the usefulness of the MOOCs. Now I want to share this information with you.

MOOCs are called massive because enrollment is not limited; instead of having a cap on students based around either physical space or teaching quality (grading for a hundred students versus a potentially unlimited number is quite different), the online courses offered allow anyone to enroll for free with no limit on how many students can enroll. This changes things, including how a course can possibly be graded without the manpower to go through thousands of tests and papers by hands, or who is able to attend, since anyone anywhere with an internet connection can access their classes.

These classes and the impact they could have on the future of the academic institution and learning are not to be dismissed, either, when you hear who have been creating these innovative classes: Harvard and MIT paired together to create edX, a Stanford professor has founded Udacity, and Coursera has a range of schools teaching their classes including Princeton, Stanford and Duke. Let's try to compare some of them.  

Canvas Network provides a place and platform where teachers, students, and institutions worldwide can connect and chart their own course for personal growth, professional development and academic inquiry.This was the first resource, which I began my acquaintance with the MOOCs. This resource is abundant with the number of free courses. Many of the courses are conducted by various famous universities in the world, they offer certificates after completing the course program. At first glance, the site is very convenient and easy to use. I liked the course called "FROM PYTHON TO JAVA: FUNDAMENTALS OF PROGRAMMING" (below I'll tell you more about it).	Coursera is a for-profit educational technology company founded by computer science professors Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller from Stanford University that offers massive open online courses (MOOCs). Each course includes short video lectures on different topics and assignments to be submitted, usually on a weekly basis. Perhaps the main advantage of the resource for users from our and the neighboring countries is Russian-language courses. Many of them are paid, however, relative to those that are available for visiting in Minsk, the prices are not high. The service offers also courses from various universities around the world.	EdX will support Harvard and MIT faculty in conducting research on teaching and learning on campus through tools that enrich classroom and laboratory experiences. At the same time, edX will also reach learners around the world through online course materials. Relying on the available information on the network, I believe that this resource has a very good reputation in the Internet space. Many courses, most are offered by the world's leading universities. I liked the visual division into categories (this is very convenient for searching). I also found an interesting course for myself, about which I will tell in more detail later.

"FROM PYTHON TO JAVA: FUNDAMENTALS OF PROGRAMMING"

The course introduces programming techniques that are useful for developing programming solutions to small and simple problems, which could be scaled up. Upon successful completion of each part, participants will receive a certificate from the School of Mathematics and Computer Science at the University of Wolverhampton. I find this course useful for me, because I would like to start studying programming in the future. The program of this course will help me to study the basic concepts of some languages and solve simple problems. The course is free and it is possible to obtain a certificate upon completion.

"BITCOIN AND CRYPTOCURRENCY TECHNOLOGIES"

After this course, I’ll know everything you need to be able to separate fact from fiction when reading claims about Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. I’ll have the conceptual foundations you need to engineer secure software that interacts with the Bitcoin network. And I’ll be able to integrate ideas from Bitcoin in your own projects. It seems to me that the future is behind the cryptocurrency. Unfortunately, I hardly know what bitcoin is and how cryptocurrency works. Therefore, this course will be very useful and interesting. The course is paid, but I hope that my investments will pay off when I start investing in Bitcoins 😄 .

"ITALIAN LANGUAGE AND CULTURE: BEGINNER"

In this language course I will learn the four basic skills (speaking, listening, reading and writing) in the context of major themes in Italian culture. By the end of the course I will be able to describe people, events and situations, both in the present and the past, and you will have acquired the necessary vocabulary to communicate about everyday situations. This course has been successfully taught in different settings to more than 1,000 students: entirely online to Wellesley College alumnae and students, and as a mix of face-to-face and online instruction at Wellesley College and MIT. I would like to study Italian, but language schools are quite expensive. This course is not a bad alternative in my opinion.