I’ve been taking a free online course at coursera.org, which features classes taught by professors at Stanford, Princeton, UPenn and University of Michigan. I tried Computer Science 101 since it was subject in which I had always been interested. The professor, Nick Parlante, is from Stanford and has ties to Google. He also sounds and looks like Dr. Rodney McKay from the Stargate TV series, only much nicer (yeah I’m a big nerd).

Each week a few video lectures, lecture notes, and exercises went up. Lectures were semi-interactive –sometimes it would pause and prompt you with a question or problem to make sure you were following the material. The exercises often involved little coding problems, which were the most fun. There were also forums to interact with other students and instructors, though I didn’t use them at all. While the content in the class wasn’t especially difficult, I learned quite a bit and managed to stick with it to the end.

Today I got this in my inbox:

Granted, it doesn’t mean much, but it’s nice to have a little pat on the back 🙂 I’m definitely going to look into more classes from coursera.org in the future.