MOOCs

Ever heard of a MOOC?  No, not the slang term (mook) you might use to identify an idiot.  But you can use a MOOC to become less of an idiot.  

Now MOOC, according to the Oxford University Press, stands for Massive Open Online Course. To quote: "A course of study made available over the Internet without charge to a very large number of people."

Learning on your schedule, and no "classroom" per se.  And free.  What a deal.

From the NYT:

Via Tablet or Smartphone, Learning With MOOCs

MASSIVE Open Online Courses — or MOOCs — are a snowballing revolution in education.

Thousands of courses from some of the world’s finest institutions are available free online, covering everything from astrophysics to the arts. For each course, students, sometimes numbering in the thousands, take part from home — where they view video lectures, take tests and submit essays through a Web interface. It’s a digital classroom with no actual “room,” and where you can study more or less when you like.

Nowadays of course, your smartphone means you can also study when you’re on the move.

Coursera’s free iOS and Android app is perhaps the very best way to take part in a MOOC through a phone or tablet — maybe during your commute to work or your lunch break. The app gives you limited access to Coursera’s list of available courses as well as any you have already signed up for.

The app’s “Find Courses” section lists courses available by subject. Each subject has its own summary page with images showing off the individual courses along with their titles, the institutions providing them and their dates.

snip

The Khan Academy app, also free on iOS, takes a slightly different approach to MOOC-based learning. In subject matter, Khan Academy courses are a little more traditional than Coursera’s, so you’re more likely to be learning about statistics or economics than Hollywood filmmaking history.

The app’s interface is simple but elegant. You can view a list of subjects, and drill down into each menu to find the course you’re interested in. Course videos then run on the screen with a neat rolling transcript shown beneath them so you can double-check, at a glance, that you heard something correctly.

Like Coursera, watching these videos syncs with your Khan Academy account, so you get credit for watching them and you can download them ahead of time to watch when offline.

If you’re just starting out learning with MOOCs, the MOOCs4U app may be worth using. This free iOS and Android app lists the many thousands of different MOOCs available from providers like Coursera, Udacity, edX and more.

Omni Study is a more generic, but also more elegant, alternative on iOS, great for organizing your study schedule. It’s $1. On Android, the free app My Study Life is a similar study planner that’s good-looking and quite powerful.

Read the rest here, you mook.