Udemy - Learn HTML5 from scratch

I've heard about HTML5 - but didn't really know what it was. So this sounded like a good course to find out.

Its fairly gentle as courses go, and all parts are explained well with all code written from scratch in front of you. It shows you how to do regular HTML first, before moving onto some of the advanced features.

So it starts with basic HTML together with inline styles, tables and input actions.

Then it moves onto CSS files and tailoring the result to look like what is required. It's quite fun to see the website evolving in front of you as you tweak padding, colors and so on.

Then it's on to HMTL5 new things. New tags, new form elements and so on. This is followed by graphics, video, geolocation, SVG graphics, mobile apps, caching and storage extensions. 

Its a very good overview, but you obviously need to know quite a lot of javascript (which isn't explicitly covered) to make good use of some of the new features.

Udemy - Introduction to Java Programming

So I was doing a bit of Android programming - writing apps and stuff.
I'd played around a bit with java when it first came out, but never written much in it. It's moved on a bit since then, so I thought I might catch up with it using this course.

I'd recommend the course for anyone who wants to learn Java. It's done at a nice slow pace, with lots of examples and takes you through each challenge showing how they would write the answer. This is always good - because normally people skip over the boring bits and head for the answer, missing out a couple of steps that you just can't seem to repeat at home.

Anyway - a great course, a little slow for me - it is meant for beginners though, so I skipped over some of the material and it was all very enjoyable,.

Udemy - Astronomy - state of the art.

Astronomy - State of the art

I spotted this course just moments before it actually started - well a day or two. I hadn't heard of Udemy before - so this was new.

It looked really good - it promised to cover a lot of areas - and I'm often concious that I only get to see stuff on galactic scales, and mostly theoretical - so this looked like it would be good for balance.

I have to say it was fantastic. You can take the course at your own speed. There was some initial attempts to have quizes as part of them - they had issues getting the system to work so they were shelved.

It really did cover pretty much the whole of astronomy, from telescopes, to planets, to stars, black holes, and galaxies to cosmology - and all stops in between in 77 chunks. It breaks down in the following topics.

• SECTION 1 INTRODUCTION
• Course Overview,
•  Description,
•  Introduction
• SECTION 2 EXPLORING OUR UNIVERSE
• State of the Art Observing, 
• Telescopes, 
• Observing Limitations, 
• Observing Solutions, 
• Adaptive Optics, 
• Space Astronomy, 
• Big Glass, 
• Gravity Waves
• SECTION 3 UNDERSTANDING OUR SOLAR SYSTEM
• Overview - Planetary Exploration
• Mars
• Mars and Water
• Mars Up Close
• Jovian Planets
• Solar System Satellites
• Titan
• Water Worlds
• SECTION 4 DISCOVERING EXTRA SOLAR PLANETS
• Overview - Extra Solar Planets
• Exoplanets
• Detection and Imaging
• Characterizing Exoplanets
• Kepler
• Habitable Zones
• SECTION 5 PROBING DISTANT STARS
• Overview - Stars
• Stars and Life
• Supernovas
• Pulsars
• Black Holes
• Testing Gravity
• SECTION 6 INSPECTING OTHER GALAXIES
• Overview - Structure & Evolution of Galaxies
• Milky Way
• Dark Matter
• Galactic Center
• Active Galaxies
• Structure Formation
• Dark Energy
• SECTION 7 EXAMINING THE COSMOS
• Overview - Cosmology
• Cosmology
• Microwave Background
• Big Bang
• Early Universe
• The Multiverse
• SECTION 8 UNCOVERING EVIDENCE FOR LIFE
• Overview - Life and Astrobiology
• The Unity of Life
• Extremophiles
• Exobiology
• Weird Life
• Drake Equation
• Communication

As well as videos, there were PDF's to read and slides available. Also supplemental audio recordings of the tutor, Professor Chris Imprey, interviewing other astronomers.

Towards the end of the course he also conducted some live sessions where we could send in questions either live or by email/twitter and he'd answer them live on video conference. They ranged from "Is there life on Mars?" to "What happens in a black hole?" and many others. Nothing seemed to phase him, and each question got a good 5 or 10 minute answer.

The course is still going - and anyone can watch the videos, read the material and take part in the interactive sessions. It's well worth it if you are at all interested.

Even better - after the quantum mechanics course I'd just taken, it was a complete relief to feel on top of a subject!

Coursera - Quantum Mechanics

A course on quantum mechanics! What am I thinking?

So I signed up for a course on quantum mechanics. I mean, how hard can it be?
Answer - *!?**!!* hard!

I brushed off my knowledge of imaginary numbers, I went through the introductory maths materials - they didn't seem too hard. OK - I struggled to remember complex conjugates, and one or two other things.

I thought there might be a reasonable introduction, and an explanation about things - which there was. However the learning curve was incredibly steep, and was sort of emphasised by the first homework.

Q1 For what was Albert Einstein awarded the Nobel prize?

• General Relativity
• The expansion of the universe
• The photo-electric effect
• Electron diffraction

OK - I actually knew that one - although it was in the course materials too.

Q2 Recall how the Schrödinger equation was motivated by the non-relativistic dispersion relation 
E=p22m. If we follow the same procedure for the case of a relativistic dispersion relation (E2=p2c2+m2c4), what equation do we arrive at? (For simplicity consider the one-dimensional case)

Ouch! The gloves are off! The lectures also had a grading system. No stars was for everyone, 1 star had some maths in it, two stars extensive maths, and three stars - mega maths. Most of the videos were in the 2/3 star range.

I actually enjoyed doing some of the integration - but realised I was gradually losing the plot as the course went on. I never really got a good handle on the bra-ket notation - I still don't really get it's power - I'm missing something I'm sure, but they didn't spend very long on it, and the books I got didn't help. Then it was onto Dirac deltas, Levi-civita notation and stuff about spin. By now I was really struggling with the weekly homeworks, and guessing as many as I was solving - I was no longer learning and close to drowning. I did think about giving up on the course, but I stayed the distance, and finished all the videos, all the homeworks.

This course had an exam - 1 chance at answer each question - 6 hour time limit. A couple of questions I could answer, the rest I guessed at, except those that required a numeric answer - which I couldn't do. I got 42% which I consider more than fair.

This gave me a total course mark of 72% - again more than I deserve.

So I probably got half way before I couldn't keep up, and for me it was hard to turn all that maths back into what it meant in the real world - even in the abstract. I guess that's not unusual in quantum mechanics!

G+C: Final

Well - just to complete this, I managed to complete the course satisfactorarily, in fact I got a distinction.

I didn't learn a huge amount, but then given I picked it because it was within my comfort level, that's hardly surprising. 

There are definitely a few down sides with this style of presentation. It's had to go at anything other than the pace the videos are delivered at - well that's not true - you can go slower by pausing them, but it's hard to skip ahead as you don't know what you might be missing. This isn't like skim reading hard copy where you can skip ahead and suddenly see something you think is important. 

Still - for the price - it is excellent value for money! :)

G+C: Module 7

So just one module this week, and quite grateful for the respite too. After the week was done, it was revealed that the instructor had gone down with a case of 'flu, and so was not available to record more videos.

This week was very interesting.
It started with some discussion of baryons, and where they are and what they're doing.
Then onto two videos on dark matter, the history and what it might be.
Then we worked on gravitational lensing, followed by a another on gravitational microlensing.
This week concluded with a module on dark energy.

So about 63 minutes in all. I got 8/10 on the quiz, so slipping from the original 10/10 days!

Interestingly they revealed some course stats today. The course started with more than 28,000 students registered. This is quite mind boggling. I'm use to a few hundred on the OU courses, maybe a thousand or two for the most popular. Apparently the drop out rate is very high - given you haven't paid for it, or anything like that, there isn't any penalty for dropping out. Coursera work on 5-10% making it through to the end.
This is a difficult course, with some quite scary maths in it, so if anything the drop out rate may be higher.

At nearly the half way point, there are more than 3,500 active users still present, so that's quite amazing.
Anyway - there is no wonder there are no written courseworks to be marked!

I'm quite staggered how popular this course in a rather niche subject is!