EdX - Engineering the Space Shuttle [Metapost]
TL;DR - Learning is a continuous process, I hadn't learnt a new thing in a while (outside of work-specific stuff) and I enrolled to the "Engineering the Space Shuttle" course of edX. This is a meta post - which means that it will list all of the other blogposts that I am going to write about this course.
Learning is a continuous process and I started fully appreciting a college/classroom education a little too late (towards the end of my college education). There are things that one can learn by themselves and there are things that have to be taught in a classroom. There are also a lot of things in between but let's ignore them for now. Also, there's a difference in what l learn from a classroom course when compared to what I learn in the classroom. I might learn things that I need or things that are relevant when I learn something by myself but I get a better sense of how everything fits together in the classroom.
The best way to get a classroom experience outside of college at the moment seem to be MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) through vendors like EdX or Coursera. I enrolled and listened to a few lectures of the Financial Markets course By Robert Shiller earlier in the year but I didn't pay too close of an attention.
Now that I have a little time on my hands and I want to get back to learning, I went looking through the courses available on edX and Coursera and I came across "Engineering the Space Shuttle by Jeff Hoffman" on edX. I enrolled to the course because I wanted to get used to sitting through a MOOC and actually completing it. I don't have an engineering background but I am interested in space so I thought what the heck. I wasn't sure what exactly I would learn from the course but I thought i'll try nevertheless. And I am pleasantly surprised.
The course instructor is an astronaut, in fact he is one of the astronauts who serviced the Hubble Space Telescope. He has a background in astrophysics and he is currently a faculty at MIT. The course was structured in an interesting way - there would be guest lecturers for most of the subjects with Prof. Jeff Hoffman covering the rest of the topics. BTW, the guest lecturers are the engineers and managers who actually worked on the various subsystems of the Space Shuttle.
I've learnt a surprising amount of work-related things in the course - especially from the point of Systems Engineering and Project Management. I also love getting to learn some of the interesting and small details of the Space Shuttle.
Learning is a continuous process and I started fully appreciting a college/classroom education a little too late (towards the end of my college education). There are things that one can learn by themselves and there are things that have to be taught in a classroom. There are also a lot of things in between but let's ignore them for now. Also, there's a difference in what l learn from a classroom course when compared to what I learn in the classroom. I might learn things that I need or things that are relevant when I learn something by myself but I get a better sense of how everything fits together in the classroom.
The best way to get a classroom experience outside of college at the moment seem to be MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) through vendors like EdX or Coursera. I enrolled and listened to a few lectures of the Financial Markets course By Robert Shiller earlier in the year but I didn't pay too close of an attention.
Now that I have a little time on my hands and I want to get back to learning, I went looking through the courses available on edX and Coursera and I came across "Engineering the Space Shuttle by Jeff Hoffman" on edX. I enrolled to the course because I wanted to get used to sitting through a MOOC and actually completing it. I don't have an engineering background but I am interested in space so I thought what the heck. I wasn't sure what exactly I would learn from the course but I thought i'll try nevertheless. And I am pleasantly surprised.
The course instructor is an astronaut, in fact he is one of the astronauts who serviced the Hubble Space Telescope. He has a background in astrophysics and he is currently a faculty at MIT. The course was structured in an interesting way - there would be guest lecturers for most of the subjects with Prof. Jeff Hoffman covering the rest of the topics. BTW, the guest lecturers are the engineers and managers who actually worked on the various subsystems of the Space Shuttle.
I've learnt a surprising amount of work-related things in the course - especially from the point of Systems Engineering and Project Management. I also love getting to learn some of the interesting and small details of the Space Shuttle.