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pheloniusfriarSeriously... who doesn't love dinosaurs??? Starts September 4th... totally free, totally awesome! There is an summary/introductory video at the link below, and you can also sign up for it there. All they will ask is for your real name, an email address, and for you to pick a password to use to sign in with... no muss, no fuss... I've completed 6 Coursera courses myself this past year and "audited" (i.e. didn't complete, heh) 4 others, this is the real deal!
Dino 101: Dinosaur Paleobiology
Instructors: Philip John Currie and Betsy Kruk — University of Alberta
Workload: 3-5 hours/week (for the pure online Coursera course)
Starts: Sep 4th 2013 (12 weeks long)
Dino 101: Dinosaur Paleobiology is a 12-lesson course teaching a comprehensive overview of non-avian dinosaurs. Topics covered: anatomy, eating, locomotion, growth, environmental and behavioral adaptations, origins and extinction. Lessons are delivered from museums, fossil-preparation labs and dig sites. Estimated workload: 3-5 hrs/wk for non-credit; 7-10 hrs/wk for credit.
Note: You don't get university credit for doing the course, but if you complete it and do well enough on the assignments or quizzes or however they evaluate people (it varies wildly from course to course as one might expect), you get a nifty printable "Certificate of Accomplishment" (well, most courses do, a couple participating universities are stuck-up sticky-beaks and will not acknowledge your participation in that way).
And... a more meta discussion...
Welcoming the University of Alberta to Coursera
As a side note, the dinosaur course has a "signature track" option (I have never used the signature track, fyi). If you choose that option, you pay money to Coursera and they validate that you are who you are and they use biometrics to verify your identity when you submit work. There is no difference whatsoever between the course content whether you are in the signature track or not. The only reason to do this is if you think you will need to prove to someone you did the work. For instance, there is a course coming up called "Introduction to International Criminal Law" (taught by Michael Scharf [!!!] of Case Western Reserve University) that offers a signature track. Some law societies allow the use of online courses to count as Continuing Legal Education credits that are required to maintain good standing in those professional organizations. To be useful, the certificates of accomplishment have to be verifiable, and the signature track provides that sort of accountability. I might take the course with Scharf as human rights and enforcement mechanisms of said rights is of great interest to me; however, I will be not be participating in the signature track (just the free learning). I guess signing up for signature track courses are a way of giving money to Coursera as well (they are a for-profit company though). As a last point on this, I read a Forbes article that said "Coursera booked more than $600,000 in revenue from its Signature services in the quarter ended June 30, up from $220,000 the previous quarter"... hmmm, one concern I had was with the long-term viability of Coursera, but if they are pulling in that kind of dough this early in the game (it was just introduced), maybe they'll make it just fine.
<cue screeching noise> hold the phone... what the what??? This is new! I was just reading the blog article about the University of Alberta joining Coursera above, and what did I behold? My mind just went <pif>... this is so exciting! If you are a University of Alberta student, you can get a transfer credit taking this Coursera online course!!! Seriously, it's PALEO200 or PALEO201 course codes for actual university credit... the PALEO200 being purely the online Coursera course only "except for graded assessments that will take place at the University of Alberta main campus", and PALEO201 is the same online course "but is supplemented by a combination of in-person discussion groups, field trips, or other hands-on experiential learning". So, you have to be enrolled at the University of Alberta to take this course for university credit (and on campus to complete the assessments for PALEO200/PALEO201 and additional participation if you take PALEO201), but (and based on my current status as a full-time undergraduate "bricks and mortar" student at Carleton University here in Ottawa) this is truly revolutionary!!! So, that's why they specified two different workloads: 3-5 hours per week if you are taking it purely as a free Coursera course, and 7-10 hours per week if you are taking it for credit at the UofA... It also means that if you do the work in the online course, you'll be getting pretty much the same education as students that are paying to go to university (the assessments, presumably, are more challenging even in PALEO200 [I'm presuming, I could be wrong] and will be done in person on the university campus, but other than that, the material is the same).
Dino 101: Dinosaur Paleobiology
Instructors: Philip John Currie and Betsy Kruk — University of Alberta
Workload: 3-5 hours/week (for the pure online Coursera course)
Starts: Sep 4th 2013 (12 weeks long)
Dino 101: Dinosaur Paleobiology is a 12-lesson course teaching a comprehensive overview of non-avian dinosaurs. Topics covered: anatomy, eating, locomotion, growth, environmental and behavioral adaptations, origins and extinction. Lessons are delivered from museums, fossil-preparation labs and dig sites. Estimated workload: 3-5 hrs/wk for non-credit; 7-10 hrs/wk for credit.
Note: You don't get university credit for doing the course, but if you complete it and do well enough on the assignments or quizzes or however they evaluate people (it varies wildly from course to course as one might expect), you get a nifty printable "Certificate of Accomplishment" (well, most courses do, a couple participating universities are stuck-up sticky-beaks and will not acknowledge your participation in that way).
And... a more meta discussion...
Welcoming the University of Alberta to Coursera
As a side note, the dinosaur course has a "signature track" option (I have never used the signature track, fyi). If you choose that option, you pay money to Coursera and they validate that you are who you are and they use biometrics to verify your identity when you submit work. There is no difference whatsoever between the course content whether you are in the signature track or not. The only reason to do this is if you think you will need to prove to someone you did the work. For instance, there is a course coming up called "Introduction to International Criminal Law" (taught by Michael Scharf [!!!] of Case Western Reserve University) that offers a signature track. Some law societies allow the use of online courses to count as Continuing Legal Education credits that are required to maintain good standing in those professional organizations. To be useful, the certificates of accomplishment have to be verifiable, and the signature track provides that sort of accountability. I might take the course with Scharf as human rights and enforcement mechanisms of said rights is of great interest to me; however, I will be not be participating in the signature track (just the free learning). I guess signing up for signature track courses are a way of giving money to Coursera as well (they are a for-profit company though). As a last point on this, I read a Forbes article that said "Coursera booked more than $600,000 in revenue from its Signature services in the quarter ended June 30, up from $220,000 the previous quarter"... hmmm, one concern I had was with the long-term viability of Coursera, but if they are pulling in that kind of dough this early in the game (it was just introduced), maybe they'll make it just fine.
<cue screeching noise> hold the phone... what the what??? This is new! I was just reading the blog article about the University of Alberta joining Coursera above, and what did I behold? My mind just went <pif>... this is so exciting! If you are a University of Alberta student, you can get a transfer credit taking this Coursera online course!!! Seriously, it's PALEO200 or PALEO201 course codes for actual university credit... the PALEO200 being purely the online Coursera course only "except for graded assessments that will take place at the University of Alberta main campus", and PALEO201 is the same online course "but is supplemented by a combination of in-person discussion groups, field trips, or other hands-on experiential learning". So, you have to be enrolled at the University of Alberta to take this course for university credit (and on campus to complete the assessments for PALEO200/PALEO201 and additional participation if you take PALEO201), but (and based on my current status as a full-time undergraduate "bricks and mortar" student at Carleton University here in Ottawa) this is truly revolutionary!!! So, that's why they specified two different workloads: 3-5 hours per week if you are taking it purely as a free Coursera course, and 7-10 hours per week if you are taking it for credit at the UofA... It also means that if you do the work in the online course, you'll be getting pretty much the same education as students that are paying to go to university (the assessments, presumably, are more challenging even in PALEO200 [I'm presuming, I could be wrong] and will be done in person on the university campus, but other than that, the material is the same).
piff
Date: 2013-08-27 06:30 am (UTC)Re: piff
Date: 2013-08-28 03:11 am (UTC)And Coursera is rocking pretty hard these days.