edX: Chasing your Dream: How to End Procrastination and Get a Job You Love Review

Chasing your Dream: How to End Procrastination and Get a Job You Love is a 5-section self-paced course on self-improvement offered by MEPhI (Russia's National Research Nuclear University) on edX. The course includes a variety of topics and activities aimed at helping learners determine their passions and how to deal with common problems that lead to procrastination. The course primarily focuses dealing with the tendency to make excuses and blame failures on circumstances, the tendency to focus on the negative and dealing with the fear of the unknown. The course assigns a grade based on a handful of section-end quizzes, but the various optional projects and activities are more important if you want to put the content into practice.


Each section of the course consists of the course consists of a series of short lecture videos (usually 1 to 5 minutes in length) interspersed with some discussion prompts and suggested activities. The video quality itself is good, but some of the language used is not as clear or precise as it could be. The lead instructor is knowledgeable and passionate about the subject, but I could see how some students might have difficulty understanding all the points he makes. The course also uses a lot of cartoonish imagery and sound effects which might not be the best choice for what should be a serious subject. You don't want a course to be serious all the time, but starting each video with a jingle that sounds like it's from a game for toddlers does not exactly give the subject the weight it deserves.


Chasing your Dream: How to End Procrastination and Get a Job You Love will get you thinking about problems that could be holding you back from finding and following your passions and how to address them and that in itself is useful, but its ideas and prescriptions are not developed and articulated as well as they could be. I am usually a proponent of self-paced courses, but for a course aimed at helping learners make changes in habits and decision making in their lives, a scheduled course with weekly content releases would probably be preferable to give students time to try use ideas from the course and track results as they go along. I commend the institution and instructor for tackling an important topic that I can't recall being addressed in any online course I've seen before, but taking it made me wish that there was a better course available on the same subject.


I give Chasing your Dream: How to End Procrastination and Get a Job You Love 2.5 stars out of 5: Okay.