Skip to main content

RIP: MOOC materials; the coronavirus effect

Coronavirus (Covid 19 caused by SARS-CoV-2) pandemic and lockdown disrupted lives and market in a completely unexpected manner. One market that seen a spike during lockdown is MOOC and online education.

What I realized of late is that many of these MOOC materials are not suitable for remote viewing. I have taken a couple of courses in random pseudonyms in Coursera and also another one in my real name in PadhAI conducted by IIT faculties. Most of these materials were recorded in a way as if they teach in physical classrooms. Because of that reason, they're very tiring to watch; they lack some basic video editing. Compare that to animated education videos posted to YouTube.

One exception to this MOOC material is MIT 6.S191: Introduction to Deep Learning (I'm yet to watch them all though)

Classical teaching jobs are in danger

These days schools are starting up online classes that follow materials similar to these MOOCs. Students are finding hard to follow them as they're used to YouTube videos. So, based on feedback, schools started to switch to a readymade library of videos. This in turn poses danger to many teaching jobs.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Converting PSD with PHP/ImageMagick

After seeing feature rich options in Imagick PECL extension at Mikko Koppanen 's (the author) website and also impressed with ImageMagick 's features, I have decided to use it for the PSD to XHTML conversion website that I'm architecting and managing. Since, the team wants programming help for converting PSD images, I have tried it (documentation is sparse on PSD handling) Converting PSD to PNG/JPEG/etc Note that, flattenImages() is needed for layered/multi-page PSD file. <?php $im = new Imagick('test.psd'); $im->flattenImages(); $im->setImageFormat('png'); $im->writeImage('test.png'); ?> Extracting PSD layers One by one <?php $im = new Imagick('test.psd'); $im->setImageFormat('png'); for ($i = 0, $num_layers = $im->getNumberImages(); $i $im->setImageIndex($i); $im->writeImage('layer' . $i . '.png'); } ?> Note that, there is a better version below In a single call with writeIm...
5 comments
Read more

Interview question #2

This is related to PHP's array . An array has number of elements. All elements are integers and unique, which means there is no repetitive integers. (e.g.) $foo = array(7, 5, 9, 13, 2, 8); You have to sort the array, provided: You should scan the elements only once. You're not allowed to compare the elements when sorting. (i.e., you're not supposed to use any comparison operators) Sorted resultant array may not be the source array. How will you do that?
6 comments
Read more

Save American College, Madurai

This post was written in 2008 and outdated now. For update, please check Save American College, Madurai (Update 2011) Update (2011-01-16) : Save American College, Madurai (Update 2011) I'm highly privileged to have 3 degrees (B.Sc. (Spl. Physics), PGDCA and MCA) from The American College, Madurai, South India . Unlike other "commercial" colleges, American College has given room for poor students and uplifted them. And unlike other "elite" colleges who'd give seat only for "intellectuals", American College has produced geniuses. In the recent months, the saddening thing is that the college is under divide (Principal Vs. Bishop). Here is the email I sent to alumnae lately informing about the informations that I received about the developments: Update (2011-01-16) : Save American College, Madurai (Update 2011) All: I was thinking that the " Save American College " campaign was a FUD . But, when I tried to understand the problem through my...
11 comments
Read more