As the week winds down, we wind down with some tidbits for your information, education, health, and enjoyment.
Quote of the Week: “Education is when you read the fine print. Experience is what you get if you don’t.â€Â Pete Seeger
Humor Break:
Bev: Al I want to be a better writer. Do you have any advice?
Al: I always follow these three rules: (1) Avoid clichés like the plague. They are old hat. (2) Be more or less specific and (3) most importantly, exaggeration is a million times worse than understatement. Hope that helps.
Stat of the Week: My, my, my how the MOOC Coursera is growing. In 14 months it has gone from 0 enrollees to 3,000,000. Here are some Stat Facts I find fascinating (data from mid-March, 2013): There are 328 courses available from 62 different universities located in 17 different countries and available in 5 different languages. The make-up of the courses is roughly Science 30%, Arts and Humanities 28%, IT 23%, Business 13% and Math 6%. Students are joining in from 220 countries. Almost 28% are from the US, the next largest group comes from Brazil, almost 9%.
Action Tip: For an excellent overview of understanding why MOOCs came into being and how they will likely develop in the future, take a few minutes and read Massive Open Online Courses, aka MOOCs, Transform Higher Education and Science from Scientific American. The Stats of the week come from this article.
Self-Development Corner:Â What could be more appropriate that to let you know what is coming up next week from Coursera:
Healthcare Innovation and Entrepreneurship (April 15, 6 weeks, Duke University); An Introduction to Interactive Programming in Python (April 15, 9 weeks, Rice University – Your teens will love this one); Drug Discovery, Development & Commercialization (April 19, 9 weeks, UC San Diego).
Happy learning!
Bill Bradley
Bill Bradley (mostly) retired after 35 years in organizational consulting, training and management development. During those years he worked internally with seven organizations and trained and consulted externally with more than 90 large and small businesses, government agencies, hospitals and schools.
