With a couple of courses from last year continuing (ChinaX which runs all year, and some mop-up on Science and Cooking), I’ve been able to enjoy MOOCs under very different circumstances than last year when any one course had to compete with 5-6 others. It occurred to me that this must be what “normal” MOOC […]
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A One Year BA? – The Prosecution
After coming up with the idea of a One Year BA, the next step was to calculate whether it was even possible to fit 30+ MOOC and other free learning courses that would meet the degree requirements of a liberal arts college or university into a twelve month timeframe. There were a fair number of […]
Hacking Homework
“Hacking” is a verb that’s attached itself to all kinds of nouns these days, generating phrases meant to imply working around standard operating procedures in order to achieve an end result as good or better (and often more quickly) than what you’d get by following the rules. The concept obviously originates in the computer programming […]
MOOCs and Cramming
Working my way through four years worth of classes over the last eleven months required dusting off those academic study habits that tend to go fallow post graduation. This includes good habits such as pacing your work, reading books and articles closely and quietly, taking notes during lectures, researching thoroughly and double-checking written assignments for […]
Singing the Praises of Short MOOCs
Well the professor for Coursera’s Fall and Rise of Jerusalem threw a peer-review essay project at us at the end of the course. And while it’s nice to have to do some writing after a fairly long creative assignment drought, it does mean that it will take another few days to finish the class I […]
How Long Should a MOOC Go On?
I got my biggest Halloween scare right before the sun went down and I logged into my edX account to see what ChinaX, Harvard’s latest edition to their MOOC catalog, would demand of me between now and the end of the year (when I anticipated its conclusion would wrap up my One Year BA). Imagine […]
Yes I Kant
It’s been a few months since I tried my hand at applying some of the subject matter I’ve been studying to issues arising out of the existence of massive open online courses. I previously used course topics such as economics, utilitarianism and entropy as a springboard for discussion of meta-matters related to MOOCs, but today […]
Advice for Fellow MOOC Maniacs
The number of people writing to say they’re planning to take on their own Degree-of-Freedom like project in the near future has grown from one a month to one a day. The stories these folks tell are varied (I’ve heard from at least two older people telling me they were actively looking to become a […]
Degree of Freedom Summertime Schedule
As some of you may have noticed, I slacked off yesterday with regard to posting something to the Degree of Freedom site. Part of the reason was to give Part 1 of my interview with Michael Roth from Wesleyan University the chance to stay at the top of the site one day after the holiday […]
Catching Up
While the first six weeks of this blog were dedicated to subjects that each required a full week of entries to flesh out (an introduction to what this project is about, course components, course providers, time, testing, and credit), it’s now time to switch to a new mode where I’ll be talking about different subjects […]
