2014 MOOCs of Interest

The second half of 2013 was relatively quiet in terms of new massive online open course offerings, but the big 3 in MOOCs--Coursera, EdX and Udacity--are geared up for a busy start to 2014 with a plethora of brand new course offerings in addition to reruns of past courses. I already mentioned the 4 new Courses coming to Udacity in a previous post, so I'll use this one to focus on some of the Coursera and EdX classes.

As I went through all the new course offerings I signed up for something like 20 classes. I always find myself signing up for way more classes than I actually plan on completing. To me, this is one of the great aspects of MOOCs: you can sign up for all sorts of topics that interest you, sample the course for the first week and then drop it doesn't fit your needs. For instance, I was signed up for Coursera's Unpredictable? Randomness, Chance and Free Will offered by the National University of Singapore as an easy, fun and short class to balance out some of the tougher classes I'm planning to take. Aside from the fact that the instructor is a little hard to understand, the courseware is basically audio along with static power-point-like slides of information, most of which are a lot denser than I'd expect out of a class that claims no prerequisites other than not having an aversion to "basic maths." Since this wasn't what I wanted out of this particular course, I dropped it; no harm done.

The only class I'm taking that's already running is Computing for Data Analysis, a basic 4 week introduction to the R programming language. Since I'm interested in data science and several other upcoming classes use R, I figured it would be good class to take. I'd like to gain proficiency with R, since R and Python seem to be growing as the standard languages for data analysis.

Other courses of interest on Coursera include Calculus: Single Variable, Fundamentals of Electrical Engineering, How to Change the World, Gamification, Introduction to Mathematical Thinking, Data Analysis and Statistical Inference, Discrete Optimization, Logic: Language and Information 1, High Performance Scientific Computing, Core Concepts in Data Analysis and Logic: Language and Information 2.

I haven't actually taken any Courses on EdX before, although I did go through an MIT intro CS course and a Haravard one before EdX came into existence, so I have some idea of what to expect. On EdX I'm signed up for UT.5.01x LAFF: Linear Algebra - Foundations to Frontiers, PHYS102x Electricity & Magnetism,  Effective Thinking Through Mathematics, and 15.071x The Analytics Edge.

I'm not sure which courses I'll actually complete until I see the content; some of them are just for fun(How to Change the World, Gamification, Intro to Math Thinking) some are reviews of things I want to remember and understand better (Calc), while some are completely new topics to me that are somewhat related to computing(Fundamentals of EE, Electricity and Magnetism, Logic). I'm going to focus primarily on the courses dealing with programming and data science.