Category: moocs

I was obscurely disappointed to discover that I wasn't the first person to come up with "MOOCopalypse". I think I could claim first dibs on "MOOCaclysm" if I wanted, since there are no Google hits for it, but it's not quite as good.

Unless you've been living under a rock for the last couple of years, you've probably heard of MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses). These are courses offered online by universities or other suppliers, intended to bring high-quality higher education resources to a wide and varied audience. I've done a few of these courses: Peter Norvig and Sebastian Thrun's Stanford AI course, one on fantasy and science fiction, and more recently Jeff Ullman's automata theory course and another on general game playing (about which I'll write something once I've had some time to work on the software I developed as part of the course).

I've just finished the final exam for Stanford's Automata Theory online course, run by Jeff Ullman. I originally chose to follow this course because 1). I wanted to learn (and in some cases re-learn) about finite automata and context-free grammars, and 2). it's Jeff Ullman (duh). The finite automata and context-free grammar stuff was fun and useful and pretty easy, but the most interesting part of the course ended up being the material about decidability, computability and tractability (P vs. NP and all that jazz). I was re-reading Hoftstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach at the same time as doing the course, and so questions of decidability and computability were bouncing around in my mind.