Do you know Coursera yet? It’s a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) company that provides a huge amount of online courses to a huge amount of students worldwide, all free. Sort of like iTunes University but with some brilliant advantages: it is interactive, with weekly quizzes, sometimes peer-reviews, exams. Students who successfully complete a class will in most cases receive a certificate signed by the instructor.

And it’s growing fast – as of February 2013 Coursera already cooperated with 62 different universities.

I have enrolled in a ridicoulessly huge amount of classes. The structure and schedule is helpful to make sure you actually get through it all, even with stressy workdays. I try to use the classes as a way to broaden my thinking and stay receptive to new inputs, even as my reluctant master thesis writing mind narrows in on my master’s thesis subject. I keep finding inspiration from the unlikeliest courses. I work through them mostly in the weekends. With some of the courses, I simply just watch the video lectures and maybe peek at the discussion forums, and with others I do everything I can to be prepared, write assignments and so on. It helps me regain a bit of confidence and just affection for the subjects themselves, because of the relaxed-but-serious atmosphere. It truly is all about the subjects, the knowledge. Cool, cool, cool. :-)