If all this sounds too familiar to you and you too want to go back to school albeit in a more a la carte fashion you have a choice now. I recently attended couple of courses from the website Coursera. It is a free offering from the ivy league universities where some of their courses are being offered in this online forum. So if you are like me where you want to pick and chose some courses of your interest without having the propensity to attend full scale degree program, then feel free to give this a ride.
Friday, July 13, 2012
Back to school
One thing that keeps me passionate about the field I work in is that the nature of the work demands that I constantly evolve as a technologist. Some key ingredients to that process is to pick up new skills on the job, read articles, attend conferences, learn from people smarter than me etc. However all this is very unstructured. Wouldn't it be nice if I could go back to school and add some structure to this learning process? At the same time I do not like to attend a full blown masters degree investing couple of years of time and top dollars for it.
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You just snatched the word from my mouth :). I was thinking about Coursera while reading the first para. You can try out MOOC as well. There are certificate courses from Ivys too, but they are costly. But one thing is for sure my friend, few alphabets awarded from a Masters program is perceived differently by the world although the real value addition is debatable. Good luck!
ReplyDeleteThanks for introducing the concept of MOOC. Looks interesting.
ReplyDeleteI agree somewhat on your comment on the perception of the world part. But as far as I'm concerned the alphabets I would perfer are the ones that depict the story of my body of work rather than the ones which abbreviate the real meaning behind them ;) Knowledge is an enabler in my line of work and I wish to see it as just that rather than being a commodity. Nothing against degree programs just weaving a verbiage around my point of view.