Post the First

A Brief Introduction to this blog

Welcome to my blog, focussing on my experiences with MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses). If you don't know what a MOOC is I won't try to explain it here but will direct you to Wikipedia for an idea of what they are.

I was directed towards MOOCs when my girlfiend signed up to a course run by Coursera so I had a look at what they had to offer. Looking at the offerings I was immediately drawn to their programming courses and signed up for one (Introduction to Interactive Programming with Python). I must say, having signed up to the course I was looking forward to getting back into learning again, having finished an Open University degree in 2010. By the end of that degree I was very low in motavation for learning, something that is essential when you are directing your own learning with distance courses, but I finished it and thought to myself that I didn't want to do anymore education for a while. That changed when I looked at the course offerings on Coursera, I even got interested in courses that I would not normally consider doing, thanks to the fact that they are free :)

So, the idea of this blog is to put in words some of my thoughts on the courses I have completed; am currently studying; and will be studying in the future. I don't really know what I want to get out of this blog, or what it could give to you the reader, I guess this is more of a brain dump of my thoughts on MOOCs and what I am getting out of them. I have plans to do quite a few courses over the next few years and hope to experience as many of the different models used by institutions in delivering MOOCs.

I will try and post regularly, with weekly updates of the courses I'm doing, but the first few posts will be catch-up posts to bring you up to speed on what I have done already.