My First MOOC

So this summer, being a lifelong learner and all, I decided to jump on the MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) bandwagon. In case you are unfamiliar with MOOCs they are online university level courses that are open to anyone with internet access. Leading MOOC organizations include Coursera, edX, and Udacity (among many others). Participants do the reading / exercises and either listen to or watch the lectures. They choose if they want to complete the assessments or not and at the end participants might receive a certificate of completion of some sort.

My first MOOC was Google's Power Searching course in late July. It was only a three week course and a new unit with activities was posted everyday. After the first week there was a mid-term assessment which participants had several days to complete. The second half followed the same format.

I honestly felt a little rushed. Every day I received a reminder email to access that day's lesson (considerate or nagging - depends on what else was on my plate and how many emails arrived around the same time). Each day's lesson took a little more than half an hour to complete. There was approximately 30 minutes of video broken down into 5 - 8 minute mini-lessons with an activity following each video and building on previous mini-lessons's skills. The lessons were well designed and had interesting content but they didn't fit into my lunch break like I anticipated.

Overall, I enjoyed the format (practice + multiple choice assessment and not having to write artificial comments on a discussion board) and the content of the course. I feel I definitely improved my Google searching skills, which was the point of the class and I'm looking forward to attempting another MOOC in the future. What MOOC's have you taken or would you like to take?

Have a great day and keep smiling! :)