Sustainable American poetic Greek and Roman mythological cryptography with Coursera

I’m finally getting around to trying a course with Coursera.

Coursera was founded by a couple of Computer Science professors from Stanford University, and its mission is to make “the best education in the world freely available to any person who seeks it”.

It launched in April this year, and has already had over a million students. Their course offering has expanded since launch, and browsing through their offerings is like being a kid in a candy store, or in my case, a bookshop. After missing out on Fantasy and Science Fiction: The Human Mind, Our Modern World, I’ve signed up for one starting tomorrow.

Of the four courses starting tomorrow; Cryptography, Gamification, Introduction to Sustainability and Web Intelligence and Big Data, I could happily do any of them. To further complicate the selection, coming up in September are jewels such as A History of the World Since 1300, Neural Networks for Machine Learning, Modern and Conteporary American Poetry and Greek and Roman Mythology.

I’ve spent too much time studying formally (majoring in IT and English & Philosophy), signed up for Honours in English (I pulled out after realising my fulltime job at the time didn’t leave much time for studying), and for about ten years used to peruse various university courses with an eye to signing up for more. Part of my reluctance was the idea of year/s spent on only one topic, and Coursera’s bite-sized modules, which seem to mostly be 4-12 weeks, fits perfectly.

It’s a revolution in education, especially for postgraduates, and I remember a friend who signed up for one having to choose between a University of Cape Town class for many thousands of rands, and a similar Coursera one taught by Stanford professors for free. I’m sure the UCT course was very good, but it really wasn’t much of a choice.

I’ve managed to resist signing up for multiple courses at once, and will be starting with neo-malthusians, climate change, peak oil and genetically-modified foods – in other words the Sustainability course taught by the University of Illinois’ Jonathan Tomkin.