Learning with MOOCs: what is it like?

A few months ago, while still waging my personal war for general knowledge, I stumbled upon the MOOCs. I had been following video courses on YouTube and lurking over other potential e-learning options when I discovered them - and it was love at first sight.
Friends on quest for knowledge, don't go any further: the greatest universities worldwide are opening their doors for us to trample through. They're the new cool kid on the educational Web and it seems like everyone's babbling about them... So I thought I would add my two pence and tell you what it's like from the inside, to learn with a MOOC.

If you haven't met them yet, MOOCs are Massive Open Online Courses, proposed by universities from everywhere (but mostly American). More than simple online videos, they want to get closer to a "campus" atmosphere, with a beginning and an end date, homework deadlines and a strong will to be as interactive as possible.

To get in, it's really quite simple: you just need an e-mail to subscribe to the course and access the lectures.
On a fixed day, the videos of the week's lecture - cut into little sessions of 10 or 15 minutes - are put online (and in HTML5, no less). Some little and fairly easy intra-video quizzes are there to check that you have understood the important concepts.
Some courses also require some reading, sometimes optional, sometimes compulsory (of course, if you're taking a literature course, you can expect to have to read a few books!). But often, the access to resources is made easy. For example, this leadership course enables students to access scientific articles which aren't in Open Access, either directly on the publisher's website, or through downloadable PDFs (and suspiciously, the teacher is often among the authors...).

Students can exchange notes and advice on the forums (but when you know that, at the beginning of a course, the number of subscribed students can reach 50 or 60 000... it's sometimes a bit hard to be heard!).
Apparently, teachers, their assistants, and Coursera's technical staff follow more or less what is said. Some teachers step in directly on the forum. Other multiply e-mail announcements to answer the most popular comments and questions. This psychology teacher seems very invested in this project and often creates new videos to address the debates roaring among students.

We also have some good old-fashioned exams, either in the form of quizzes or essays (or something less traditional as in the Songwriting course I took, where lyrics or music excerpts were asked each week).
Grading methods vary from course to course. For example, this management course values participation and asks to write a minimum of 20 posts on the courses' forum (with the excess you can expect: myriads of uninteresting subjects and the same themes repeated over and over, especially in the first weeks). Some essays only require a minimum of 100 words to obtain automatically the maximum grade. Other go through peer review: each week, the student evaluates at least 5 of her peers so as to be able for everyone to get some interesting feedback. I must confess that this is my favourite method: I really get the impression that it's while trying to assess the work of someone else that we really get the whole dimension of the notions we're supposed to have acquired. And I have received some really interesting reviews, full to the brim with wise advice.

In the end, we get a nice little virtual diploma vouching for our participation and success in class. Some courses even propose (for some sum of money) to validate more officially your participation so as to be able to bring it out in a professional context. But, in my humble opinion, the interesting part is really in the pleasure of learning new things, in a well delimited, interactive and motivating environment.

You've guessed right: I'm in love with MOOCs. If you've got a somewhat school-loving soul, or if you're just hungry for knowledge, you're in for a treat. So let me tell you that I immediately signed in for three new courses and that my schedule is full until next year...

In conclusion, here is a little collection of courses that you might like. Have fun!

• Learning more about metadata: over here.
• Working on your general knowledge? Here is a course on ideas of the twentieth century.
• If you have the occasion to do some users' training or any other form of teaching, Coursera planned a series of courses called "Foundations of Teaching for Learning".
• Globalizing Higher Education and Research for the 'Knowledge Economy'... I'm definitely taking this one!
• An initiation to Web developing proposing to build your own blog.
• If anybody's as much a fan as I am of paleo-anthropology, here is a course about human evolution.
• And finally, especially for foodies, an approach to kitchen science

The above photo was taken by me in Paris, in February 2013.
This photo and text are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution - ShareAlike 2.0 Generic License.

The Elusive Figure of General Knowledge

I've always been attracted by the elusive figure of general knowledge. By the promise of well-roundedness, by the mirage of a better understanding of our world. And, because of the French wording of this particular concept ("Culture Générale"), by all of the meanings enclosed in the word "Culture". But, more importantly, I wanted to find meaning and order in all of this knowledge, all of this culture.
In high school already, I was avidly searching through encyclopaedias for neat time lines, pouring over the great trends of music through history, taking notes about the succession of ideas through the course of the world. When I began the game of competitive exams, general knowledge mutated into a requirement, and my original attraction became a real obsession. I needed to jump through the hoop of general knowledge dissertation to enter the top ranks of public service and its libraries.

I took the tests for years, always hopeful and enthusiast: the exercise was quite amusing and I was flirting with results almost good enough to pass. Meanwhile, I also worked my way through library school, a first job in an academic library and eventually passed a mid-level competitive exam to become a civil servant. What I've discovered through this process, is that my love for organising general knowledge in my head is what makes me an honourable librarian (or so I hope). It makes me thrive for coherent collections, for well-thought development policies and rigorous classification. But it doesn't make me any better at general knowledge dissertation, and, on that level, I'm certainly not able to compete against youngsters just out of literature or history preparatory classes.

So, I decided to stop fretting about exams for a while, and just rejoice in practising a job I love while enjoying my day-to-day stroll through cultural regions. I didn't give away general knowledge, I just keep the overall point of view for my library work, and dip timidly through its deep waters in my down time, not searching to get everything into my head, just enjoying the ride.
It materialised through different ways. In my intensified readings, in my discovery of MOOCs, in the curation feature I instituted on my original blog. I hope to tell you about all of this in the near future.
It also showed through a broader desire for more adventures, for exploring unknown territories. Since the beginning of this year 2013, I began running, I visited Japan, I tasted tons of new dishes and pushed myself to meet knew people. And now I want to push the adventure further and live somewhere else, discover a new way to work and to live. Taking the German definition of the word and burning to experience another culture, another country, another civilisation. And keeping to pick up bits of general knowledge along the way.


The above photo was taken by me in Kyoto, Japan, in April 2013.
This photo and text are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution - ShareAlike 2.0 Generic License.