The Incredible MOOCs

As an educator, a student and a lifelong curious learner, I just love the MOOCs. I was introduced to the concept while I was a graduate student at Stanford in 2000. Over the last 5 years, I have completed around 25 courses and have tried at least 100 courses through various MOOC platforms like EdX, Coursera, FutureLearn, Udacity, iVersity, and other institution specific ones.

MOOCs, either for free or with a few hundred dollar fee, have enabled me to explore completely new fields like History, Political Science, Philosophy, Neuroscience, Education and many others, at both graduate or undergraduate levels; this is something that would not have happened without these open and especially, cost effective platforms. The Spatio-Temporal convenience of such a format is just incredible, especially, considering that I have moved to different countries while still continuing my learning. Also, the ability to sample courses from hundreds of academic and Industry institutions from all over the world is simply amazing. Over the last 18 years, the MOOCs have given me the ability to fill gaps in my knowledge in a structured way and have significantly enhanced my ability as an entrepreneur and as an educator. I mean if I desire/need to quickly learn a new subject area at an introductory level and/or intermediate level, the MOOCs enable me to do it over the course of 4-8 weeks and at my own pace. For every little piece of domain knowledge, it is not easy to find a class and/or seminar at a nearby college; plus, even if you are able to do, it is quite inefficient to physically go to classes, hence making them impractical for working professionals.

Many youngsters and lifelong learners can also simply take a sequence of courses either in the form of a specialization and/or full-fledged graduate degrees and can really pivot their careers in new directions that they see fit for themselves every 10-15 years; this I believe, is one of the most valuable skills to thrive in the 21st century. If you want to re-invent yourself, this is one of the best routes that I would recommend to most people.

Personally for me, the best is the ability to explore new fields and areas of knowledge that I thought would never have interested me or never knew existed. One such example of this discovery is the amazing field of Neuroscience. Being from a Technology, Entrepreneurship and recently Education backgrounds, I had always thought that I would do my terminal degree (doctorate) in one of those areas that fit my previous backgrounds. This is normally considered to be a natural progression in higher education; i.e. you mostly do your doctoral in areas in which you either have an undergraduate or master’s degrees. Choosing something completely different at the doctoral level is very rare, since it assumes a lot of background knowledge. However, thanks to the incredible MOOCs, I have managed to acquire the requisite background training of the underlying brain sciences, have brushed up on my computing skills and through MOOCs have seen the applicability of Neuroscience in fields like Linguistics, Entrepreneurship (cognition and mindset) and Education (Learning and Memory), thereby, enabling me to prepare and eventually pursue an interdisciplinary PhD covering disciplines/majors which solves the education problems in my country. This discovery and preparation of a completely new and unknown path, for which I have developed a passion over a couple of years, could not have been possible without the MOOCs. I am sure of it!