A few months ago, I wrote about the Coursera community, which was set up in October 2018.
Isolation can be a major disadvantage of online learning. When I started taking MOOCs, I did not expect to engage with other learners. I was surprised when I investigated the discussion forums of those early courses and found a vibrant culture. Many of the course sessions had tens of thousands of learners in each. If you had a question or an observation, someone was likely to answer it within hours, if not minutes. The social aspect was an eye-opener for me and I was delighted to “meet” people from many countries.
Fast forward several years. With frequent repeated sessions of thousands of courses now available, many individual courses have few active members in their discussion forums. Instead of separate discussions within courses, the Coursera community serves as a platform-wide discussion forum with a wide range of topic threads. Anyone registered with Coursera can join in and have some social contact in an otherwise isolated learning environment.
Coursera Collections
One thread caught my eye earlier this year: Create your own Coursera course collection! With more than 50 Coursera courses under my belt, I couldn’t resist posting my own collection of courses.
Some weeks later, I received a message from Laura, the Coursera Community Manager, asking for permission to add my collection to Coursera’s Collections list.
Naturally, I agreed with delight. If my group of courses is as enjoyable or helpful for others as it has been for me, I can honestly say that’s another benefit of my online learning journey.
You can find my list of Courses to Live Your Best Life here. It has joined more than 100 collections curated by Coursera staff members and learners from around the world.
Some lists are directed towards particular career paths such as programming or data science. Others, like mine, have less emphasis on skills for specific careers.
Why I Recommend These Courses
Here are brief overviews of my chosen courses. Follow the links for full reviews of Learning How to Learn, Learning How to Learn for Youth, and Ignite Your Everyday Creativity. You can also read about how I became involved in Mindshift.
- In Learning How to Learn, Barbara Oakley’s passion for learning is infectious. The Pomodoro Technique is excellent not only for learning, you can also use it to start and finish any unwelcome task. And that’s only one small part of the course.
- Learning How to Learn for Youth serves as a helpful refresher – you don’t have to be a young person to enjoy it. The course includes some engaging activities not found in the first course.
- Mindshift gives learners the tools and confidence to branch out and try a new career. Look out for me in the Week 1 video Mastery Learning!
- Frequent small wins add together so you can achieve your goals. In The Science of Success, you create your own action plan.
- Ignite Your Everyday Creativity shows that everyone can think creatively. I discovered a big stumbling block in my thinking while taking this course. Overcoming it helped me improve my creative thoughts and find solutions where previously I would have simply said, “It can’t be done.”
- In A Life of Happiness & Fulfillment, Dr. Raj’s boundless enthusiasm and jokes connect with learners everywhere. Do this course, try the activities, and find more happiness in your life.
- Take Sit Less, Get Active to learn plenty of simple ways to increase your activity and why we should keep moving.
- In Sleep: Neurobiology, Medicine, and Society, you’ll learn about the disastrous effects of not getting enough sleep on individual health and society as a whole, with increased medical costs and lost productivity.
A Final Thought
Want to improve your knowledge, happiness, or health? Try these courses; you can audit them for free.
By Pat Bowden, published November 21, 2019.
