Winter break learning
hour a day keeps the bad grades away!
Or so I hope, anyway.
Winter has officially started here in Canada. As I write, my driveway is patched with snow, most of it shovelled to the sides. Thankfully, my winter break has also started, which means no more hellish commutes through stormy weather!
I’ve been thinking a lot about online education lately (co-incidentally, also because of the time and energy I spend commuting to university every day). The first course I took online was in high school. It was the summer before my senior year, I had no job and I wanted to lighten the load for my last year. An online course seemed like the perfect solution! And it was. Maybe it’s because “Writer’s Craft” didn’t require a lot of technical learning and hand-holding, or maybe I’d just adjusted to online communication to the point that I didn’t need to be in a real life classroom to learn, but my online course that summer went well. We had a discussion forum for the class, a messaging system to communicate with the teacher and a portal that listed all of our mandatory readings and a place to submit assignments. What more could one need?
And then I started university.
Well, turns out thing “one” needs is video tutorials, preferably delivered in short bites. The big difference between technical and non-technical courses is that the former require a more “hands-on” teaching. The advent of video tutorials has really been a wonderful addition to online learning, and really, I can no longer imagine an online course without this component.
And the more I think about all of this, the more I wonder why huge first survey year courses (such as biology, sociology, intro programming, etc.) aren’t taught this way already. It would save hell of a lot of time and money for all involved! And in our world of “get what you want, when you want”, it just makes sense.
Personally, online courses and tutorials have saved me a lot of reading and time. I especially like MIT’s opencourseware, which — if you’re in computer science like me — offers a lot of great lectures on material we’re covering in our own courses. Their “Introduction to Algorithms” series is most excellent! YouTube, of course, is full of tutorials for just about everything, from knitting to learning how to make your first Android app. Then there’s Khan Academy, which I wish I had in high school!
A new website I’ve just been introduced to is Udacity. Like Coursera (which also has great material, but I haven’t used it enough to form an opinion), Udacity offers online lectures, broken down into small videos with quizzes at the end of each section. The thing that makes Udacity unique (at least in my opinion) is that the courses are a lot more focused on current application of technology, whereas Coursera feels more like a theoretical, university education (and rightfully so!).
Point is, they’re apples and oranges in a sense, but since winter break is short, I’ve decided to go with apples (because, you know, no peeling! ;)).
Putting free time to productive use is the ultimate procrastinator dream, so I’m going to use an hour of my day every day for the next two weeks towards this course: HTML5 Game Development.
I love HTML5 (and web development, in general) and I’ve never done game development before, so I figure this is a great opportunity to learn something new and have fun doing it. And, of course, have something to write about in this collection!
And so it begins.
