It's called Coursera.org. Dode checked it out and found a class he wanted to take on computer game design. He sent me a link where one of the founders of Coursera explained what it was.
Coursera classes are free. Because they are free, you don't get college credit for them. What you do get is the education that the colleges classes offer. Instructors teaching at top colleges from around the world create classes. They post video lectures, give homework assignments, and have quizzes. Anyone can sign up to take the class, following along week by week with the assigned work. Through this forum, a teacher can reach many more students than in a traditional classroom. How many more? There are 80,000 students in one of my classes!
I'm the kind of student who always took extra classes in college. Back then, a person could take 15-18 credits for the same price. I always took 18 credits because I love learning. A full load is 15 credits. Those extra three credits were an extra class every quarter! It felt like free education and I choose classes that weren't part of my major but were ones that interested me. Back in the fall, I looked through the course catalog for Coursera and didn't see anything I was interested in until January. In January/February there were four classes I wanted to take. I decided to sign up for all of them with the idea that they were free and if it ended up being too much, I could drop classes. I signed up for personal finance, foundations of human nutrition, nutrition for disease prevention and intermediate algebra.
The finance class started a week before the rest and I had no problem getting the work done. A week later, it was time to add the next three classes. The nutrition classes each had about an hour of lectures to watch plus quizzes and homework. The algebra class recommended using an optional computer program at another website to do the homework. It's called ALEKS. I paid $50 for a 12 week license and took the assessment to see how I was doing. I could have done the class without ALEKS but I'm learning so much more by using it. After over 20 years away from math, it revealed that I had 80 different concepts to master in one week to catch up with the class. Yikes! I also learned that ALEKS considered this class I'm taking to be pre-calculus. I'd taken calculus in college but that was a long time ago. I wondered if I'd overreached but started working my way through the 80 concepts.
Dode always tells the children, "In math, if it's not neat, it's wrong."
He flipped through the pages and pages of math I've done and said, "Well, it's neat so it must be correct!"
I found it almost addicting. My brain was craving that math. Concepts I'd learned years ago were coming back to me and I was able to make it through the backlog of work in a week. I won't tell you how many hours I spent on math that week but it's in the double digits! I was also able to see what concepts I'd only learned years ago just enough for a test. When I was re-learning something I'd mastered before, I could feel my brain clicking away thinking things like, "Yes! This makes perfect sense! Give me more!" When I was working on things I'd never fully learned, it was like starting from scratch and puzzling them out. The reason I wanted to take the class was to help the children with their homework. They've looked at the work I'm doing and said, "Mom, you're way beyond us!" They also think I'm crazy. The idea of doing recreational math is absolutely foreign to them. They prefer to do as little math as possible. To find their mom giving up reading for pleasure to sit and do math just blew their minds! But, the tools I'm using are also used in their algebra so it was with joy that I helped Anastaya with a properties of exponents assignment without having to do a quick google refresher first!
For now, I am able to manage getting the work done in my four classes by getting up an hour early each day and by spending all the time I would be reading a book working on my classes. In March, as three of my classes are winding down, Dode, Isaac and I will be taking a physics class, "How things work". We will be able to portfolio Isaac's work for high school credit and it will give the three of us something to talk about together.
No comments:
Post a Comment