Globally connected through education

During my ongoing literature review I often discover interesting facts about things I’ve never thought about. Sometimes I can connect these facts with my own observations: The result is mostly a completely new idea why things are as they are. Maybe these ideas are new to you, too. Therefore I’ll share my new science based knowledge with you!

This week: This time, I like share some of my recent experiences I made with the online education website Coursera.

This article is one of the very rare exceptions, that will not cover any computer game related topic. Instead, I want to talk a bit more about new ways how scientific education takes place. However, I don’t want to generalize this topic in this article. Instead, I like to introduce this world wide learning environment by presenting my latest experiences.

The new learning environment I’m talking about is coursera.org. Coursera is an education company that allows universities and organizations to create online education courses for free. Almost everyone from all over the world can gain access to Coursera and join a broad variety of different courses.
As I was introduced to Coursera, I found the concept very appealing, but at this time, I had so many other things in mind and I never felt like it would be a good idea to join an online course. Of course, I still don’t have much time and so it might sound a bit crazy to join a class with several hours of workload per week, but I’m really enjoying it and it’s also a bit like a recreation to me, when I’m engaged in a completely different scientific field.

Joining a course in Coursera is almost like enrolling in a course at a university. The biggest difference comes from the fact, that these courses are online and can be accessed on an individual time schedule. Every week new video lectures are published and can be viewed by the students. Additionally, some supplementary material can be provided to enhance the learning outcome. Finally, the Coursera website provides a homework function so that students can also complete homework tasks, when they’re interested in.

From my point of view, the most interesting feature of Coursera comes from the fact that it connects people from all over the world. Students from all over the world, who probably would have never met, can discuss the knowledge presented in the video lectures and help each other to solve the homework assignments.

I like to end this short article with my most recent Coursera experience. The instructor of my current course is very active on the forums and provides a lot of supplementary material to enhance the learning outcome. One of the most impressive things he did were some Google Hangouts[1]. Interested students had the opportunity to join him in a Google Hangout and talk to him „face-to-face“ about the topics of the course. As I joined one of these hangouts, I really felt connected to the whole world. Not only that I was able to ask my instructor some questions, I was also able to follow the discussion with other participants from all over the world.

Thank you Ronen Plesser for giving us so many great insights into astronomy and for spending so much of your time on answering our curious questions.