Anyone taking online courses?

[palitoy]

So, one of my resolves this year was to get better at everything.

It started with audio books in the car but more recently I've grown addicted to online courses.

Currently, I've been buying them at udemy.com and i'm having some positive experiences.

Just curious if anyone else does this and wants to share recommendations and feedback.

[rche]

I work with various after school programs teaching robotics and programming to the kids (and occasionally tutoring some adults). Tho I have a degree in engineering, I don't really have anything on paper to show for education, and have been considering some online courses just so I can have a little more to say than 'well, I've been doing this for years' when people ask me about my background. Experience counts for quite a bit, but when it come to edu and kids, it seems to ease tensions if you have some sort of gold sticker. I have wondered about online courses and am glad to here you have had positive experiences with them. I look forward to other responses in this thread.

[palitoy]

I totally understand and can relate to what you're saying about having a piece of paper.

My first course was a bit shaky, it was about sales and the guy comes from the "Glengarry Glen Ross" school, also he kept injecting his strange political ideology into the mix but I powered through and gained a different perspective.

My second course is a ten hour facebook marketing course that was way more hands on (you have to hand in projects) and the first hour taught me ten things I didn't know. So, I'm pretty pumped about this one.

[Confessional]

My wife loves taking online courses with the Stan Winston School of Character Arts (fee & membership-based), and I dig the Masterclass tutorials from Winsor & Newton (free). I also periodically participate in the interactive presentations that Americans for the Arts/Public Art Network and their affiliates offer (membership-based).

For us - both working in the creative industries - we look for quality on-going professional development opportunities rather than the bulk of *traditional* eLearning. Nothing beats live learning experiences in a studio or collective lab with a dynamic instructor, but there are some folks who are transcending distance learning with real-world collaborative models, rather than uploading lame PowerPoints or read-n-respond.

When I teach, I'm certainly combining techniques culled from experiences across platforms. In recent years my effort is to encourage participants to be life-long students not only of their interests/skills, but also of their own work/career paths.

[Hedji]

My wife loves taking online courses with the Stan Winston School of Character Arts (fee & membership-based)

Wow, that's really cool. Now there's a class I could see myself taking after retirement.