Well I just finished up my first Coursera course and I must say that I was impressed.  The course that I took was called Computing for Data Analysis and was offered by Dr. Roger Peng at Johns Hopkins University.  The course was really something else.  It was billed as a no experience required introduction to R.  I think that this might be a bit of a stretch.  Several of my friends that had no experience in R found the assignments unclear and felt that the lectures and other materials did not prepare them for the programming assignments.  I have some experience (just self-taught playing around in R) and found it to be challenging but useful and informative.  I don't know the final attrition numbers but 47,831 people enrolled in the course while only 1,643 roughly 3.5% successfully submitted the first programming assignment.  Despite a few growing pains in the first week or two I am glad that I stuck with it.  I learned a number of concepts that will improve the efficiency of functions that I write in the future.  Probably more importantly I come away with a better understanding of the data structures that are implemented in R.  I am planning on offering an R applications in evolutionary biology seminar this spring and this class will definitely help to make that a better experience.

I am also in the Stats 101 course offered by Andrew Conway from Princeton.  It finishes this coming week.   I took this course because despite having taken a couple of stats courses a lot of it just doesn’t feel intuitive the way I would like for it to be.  I really like the format that he employed standing in front of a 50”+ monitor and lecturing with an I pad… easy to watch and it definitely improved my comfort with multiple regression and ANOVAs.

I believe that MOOCs (massive open online courses) are going to become an important part of education in the future.  I have two years of experience lecturing about generally biology, zoology, entomology, and my own research.  One thing that I have learned is that explaining things in a fashion that fosters real understanding is not magic.  However, it is nontrivial, and it certainly comes easier to some people than to others.  With today’s technology what possible excuse do we have for not to sharing our best teachers with everyone in the world.  I personally feel privileged to get to pick and choose professors from some of the best universities in the country and supplement my education by listening to their explanations and working through the types of problems that they feel test and illustrate the important concepts of a topic or method.

Probably the two biggest current MOOC Offerings are:
Coursera
Udacity

I first became a promoter of open education via the work of Sal Khan years ago.  He has done some absolutely amazing work in promoting this culture.
Sal's TED Talk




Cheers