So, you took an online course? Did you get a diploma?
That is a popular question that comes up after telling a person you took an online course. Luckily, the answer is often yes, since the most prestigious platforms of online courses (Coursera and edX) do provide one.
This is a nice step into the democratization (in the good sense of the word) of education.
I think it is good practice for any online learner to maintain such a Diploma Wall, not only to show off, but also to remind himself of his achievements, to have a visual cue to his library of knowledge (just as a book in a bookshelf reminds you of its main ideas), and, importantly, to have fast access to such library of knowledge.
Some of the course providers offer a link to verify the authenticity of the diploma. In the case of Paid courses the learner gets perpetual access to the content course (videos, text version, and all). Free courses usually don’t offer perpetual access to the content (so you need to take notes). Anyway, most of my notes from my Bachelor’s or Master’s degree have been lost, so this is an advantage of online courses over traditional degrees!
Here is my Diploma Wall. Click on the links to see a specific diploma or scroll down to see the whole wall.
- LEARNING HOW TO LEARN – UC San Diego
- INTERACTION DESIGN SPECIALIZATION
- (7 courses) – UC San Diego
- BEHAVIORAL ECONOMICS – University of Toronto
- STATISTICS FOR BUSINESS 1 – Bangalore Institute of Management
- ENTREPRENEURSHIP 101 – WHO IS YOUR CUSTOMER? MIT
- GAMIFICATION – University of Pennsylvania
LEARNING HOW TO LEARN – UC San Diego
- Focused and diffuse modes of thinking
- Chunking and illusions of competence.
- Einstellung, Choking and Interleaving
- Procrastination: Process vs Product
INTERACTION DESIGN SPECIALIZATION
(7 courses) – UC San Diego
Course 1 – Human Centered Design – An introduction.
- User Interviewing / Needfinding
- Prototyping
- Heuristic Evaluation
Course 2 – Research and prototyping
- User Research
- Creating Personas
- User Experience and Human-Computer Interaction Principles.
Course 3 – Design Principles
- Visual and Information Design (Typography, Grids, Alignment…)
- Designing and Running experiments (In person, online, A/B testing…)
Course 4 – Social Computing
- Coordination Online and in real life.
- Comparing and contrasting online collaboration platforms.
- Crowdsourcing
Course 5 – Input and Interaction
- Human input on different devices
- Comparing and contrasting online collaboration platforms.
- Crowdsourcing
Course 6 – Information Design
- Wireframing, Mockups.
- Responsive Design.
Course 7 – Designing and running experiments.
- Statistics
- Experiment Design
- Testing assumptions
BEHAVIORAL ECONOMICS – University of Toronto
- Concepts in Behavioral Economics: Nudging, Mental Accounting, Choice Overload, Pain-of-Paying, among others.
- Incentive design
- Nudge design
STATISTICS FOR BUSINESS 1 – Bangalore Institute of Management
- Excel tools for statistics (pivot tables..)
- Building histograms, scatterplots. Calculating correlation coefficients
- Asymmetry and peakedness (skewness, kurtosis). Building box plots
- Joint, marginal and conditional probabilities in real business scenarios. Bayes rule
- Decision trees
ENTREPRENEURSHIP 101 – WHO IS YOUR CUSTOMER? MIT
- Excel tools for statistics (pivot tables..)
- Building histograms, scatterplots. Calculating correlation coefficients
- Asymmetry and peakedness (skewness, kurtosis). Building box plots
- Joint, marginal and conditional probabilities in real business scenarios. Bayes rule
- Decision trees
GAMIFICATION – University of Pennsylvania
- Gamification vs games
- Thinking like a game designer
- Behaviorism, Reward Structures, Reward Schedules
- Types of players
- Enterprise gamification
Rodrigo Serrano 