Nowadays is almost impossible not to learn something in an easy way. Globalization of content and information (evidently through internet) has skyrocketed the learning and educational possibilities worldwide. I took advantage of this mostly through tutorials, guides and free online applications such as Codeacademy, Blogger, WordPress. Only recently (several months ago) I became aware of the MOOC phenomenom (massive open online courses).
I wasn’t a fan of the classic distance education scheme but since MOOC is basically distance education 2.0, I can declare myself a fan now. From the multitude of subject I stumbled upon something that was in my immediate interest, and that is IT Security. Australian based university Charles Sturt recently had a short course on Information Security Incident Handling, a subject on how breaches are to be handled in a corporate environment.
The course consisted of 4 lectures and an examination. The lectures were recorded power-point presentations on the subject, being available during the course and after. Each came with external resources on the details from the presentation. Although IT security wasn’t something new to me, incident handling was so this gave a me a perfect insight on the subject.
I highly recommend joining MOOCs due the following advantages:
- university level courses – having systematic approach on learning a subject
- time flexibility – the ability to join courses and take exams in a flexible manner
- relationship to certifications – although you will not get any academic credit nor a certification it can be useful in getting one
- a plus in your CV
- free
Check out the universities website from more courses, as I can see that they’re updated monthly with new ones. Or if that doesn’t suits your interests you can find a bigger variety on websites specialized in promoting MOOCs.