Learning online! My experience with Edx!

Recently I knew about a great page called Edx in which you can take online courses for free from the most prestigious universities from all over the world. As you may know if you read my last post I decided to get a B.S. in Computer science, so I thought it would be a great idea to start getting my feet into water. Reading a post in a famous blog called Life Hacker (which I highly recommend you to visit) I found a course in Edx about computer science (CS50x) which is given by Harvard university!

I saw an introductory video which was really fun and encouraged me to try out the course. It started in week 0, were we had to do a video game, with an educational program made by the MIT called Scratch, in which you can learn the bases of programming in a very intuitive way (If you want to take a look at my project click here, it got a 10 out of 10!)

Up to now the course has been teaching us to program in C. But, apart from all of the things that I’m learning from this challenging course, I was amazed by the way lectures were given! I thought Harvard would have really boring and difficult lessons given by a very formal old guy hah, but the first statement was completely wrong, and the second one is partly true. On one hand, lectures are getting each time harder, the learning curve they expect from you demands a lot of effort and time, but on the other hand the explanations are great, you have an awesome amount of material, from walkthroughs, shorts, books, videos and we even have a live show each two weeks, in which we have tours around Harvard university, we get to see the snowy campus live, etc. Last week a teacher who gave lectures to Bill Gates (when he still was at Harvard) gave us a tour around the technology museum, showing the Mark one computer, etc. The great thing about all this stuff is they give you a real sense of how studying at Harvard university is, and you also get access to different groups in Facebook, Reddit, etc. In which you can talk and interact with your classmates from all over the world, which is great!

Press the play button in the video to see the live session I told you above!

The lecturer Dr. David J. Malan is one of those rock star teachers that we all love; he makes lectures incredibly fun, even when the topics are quite boring (If you don´t believe me press here to see two girls singing a song for him hahah). For example, in the first lesson in order to show us how to search in a more efficient way he broke a phone book in halves to exemplify a case of Binary search…

Obviously, there are a wide range of different courses about different topics, from history, to biology, psychology to ecology; there are courses for all tastes! Oh and they have assignments to do which are graded, and if all the submitted assignments (exactly the same ones students at Harvard have to do) have a grade of at least 60% you are given a certificate!

So I encourage you to enter Edx and experience it yourself! I have a classmate who is a retired mechanical engineer and always wanted to learn how to program, so even he almost struggles to use Facebook, he is advancing in the course. So it´s never to late to learn!