Heartening implications

Like Patience Hodgson I, too, often need vivication, most frequently finding outlet through poorly prepared culinary creations, woozily written beastly books, ruminant regarding of titillating tomes and, in  the summer, supremely successful crop cultivation.

Further, i seem to have an unquenchable need for information, finding new perspective and consequently, learning new things and, to that end, have been engorging on the offerings at coursera, recently completing Drugs and The Brain with a solid "Pass,"  --a nice refresher, and a lot of interesting new ideas...

Coursera offers free, online college courses on numerous topics -- currently, I'm enrolled in Astrobiology and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life and The Social Context of Mental Health and Illness.  Really jumping out of the box, eh?

Thomas Friedman has an article, today, in the New York Times about this "revolution::

Last May I wrote about Coursera — co-founded by the Stanford computer scientists Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng — just after it opened. Two weeks ago, I went back out to Palo Alto to check in on them. When I visited last May, about 300,000 people were taking 38 courses taught by Stanford professors and a few other elite universities. Today, they have 2.4 million students, taking 214 courses from 33 universities, including eight international ones.

To which, Dr. Henry A. Lester, our fantastic guide through Drugs and the Brain comments:

Here are preliminary impressions and numbers from “Drugs and the Brain”, which I teach on Coursera with an excellent staff at Caltech. We run for one more week; then we’ll issue about 4400 “Statements of Completion” to students from more than 75 countries. The 3800 surveys in hand show the most frequently represented: the US (30%), Spain (7%), Brazil (6%), and the UK (5%). Student ages range from 13 to 83. Coursera has streamed roughly 900,000 “miniLectures”, each about ten minutes long.

I note the remarkable levels of ambition and previous accomplishment, varying little among the countries represented. Students report courses in molecular/cellular biology (50%), human biology (50%), biochemistry (40%), and neuroscience (30%). 10% of them have PhD degrees, and 7% have MD’s. Roughly 8% of the students are pharmacists, 2% psychiatrists, and 2% neurologists. Roughly 15% have held grants from the National Institutes of Health or comparable agencies around the world. Some two dozen commented on my latest research paper. An active forum finds errors in my miniLectures, and these errors persisted undetected for years in my Caltech lectures.

I emphasize that other students, with less preparation, are taking the course because of friends or relatives who have specific conditions. Medical advice is not allowed in our forums. But these students, too, are learning from the remarkable online community that has generated more than 5,000 postings and 164,000 views.

Curious that course is largely populated by English and Portuguese speakers -- I wonder if there is some sort of connection there...  Hmm... 

Withal, coursera offers a great way to gain new ideas, information, or, for re-engaging and better understanding topics of ongoing interest - and obviously serves a large interest, with 2.4 million students!


The Grates - Turn Me On from Dimitri Basil on Vimeo.