A few days ago I was at a reception and a lady from KU Leuven was talking about MOOCs. A MOOC is a Massive Online Open Course. Think of it as going to university but the whole experience is online.

This reminded me of a MOOC I enrolled in a few years ago called CS50. This was an online version of following Computer Science at Harvard University.

At the time I was wildly enthusiastic about it. I learned about programming concepts to make a small game using Scratch, then applied the same principles in C. The videos that explained the concepts were very high quality and I thought the whole thing was so well done.

One interesting aspect was that there was a CS50 subreddit where you could ask questions to your fellow students. The students would help each other and a community would form. It was very cool.

I ended up only doing a few weeks of the course and then gave up due to lack of time and interest, but nonetheless it was still a good learning experience.

Yesterday I enrolled into a new class… this time on something entirely different: screenwriting. It costs some money — $90 — as opposed to CS50 which was free. But I feel that that’s a small price to pay for valuable content. Onwards!