Course: International Humanitarian Law
Length: 7 weeks
School/platform: Université catholique de Louvain
Instructors: Raphaël Van Steenberghe, Jerôme de Hemptinne
Quote:Starting with the sources and subjects of IHL, as well as its scope of application, the course will address the main substantive norms of IHL governing: the conduct of hostilities; the protection afforded to persons in the hands of the enemy; occupation; and implementation of IHL.
We will discuss questions such as:
• who and what can be targeted by the enemy.
• which weapons can be used.
• which method of warfare is authorized.
• who enjoys protection and what type of protection.
• which norms apply in non international armed conflicts.
We will also deal with the different ways through which IHL can be implemented and how belligerents may be held accountable for violations of its rules when committing war crimes or crimes against humanity.
Short version: Fascinating course, highly relevant to current events, but be prepared to do some serious work. I took the preliminary International Law mooc (listed as a prerequisite, for good reason) last fall, so I had some idea what to expect. Don’t be discouraged by a poor showing on the first exam: it’s the hardest of the course, and it’s possible to recover from a horrible score and finish with a reasonably decent grade. Trust me. 😉
The course was divided into three sections. The first, two weeks long, outlined the distinctions between IHL and Human Rights law. IHL pertains to rights and responsibilities in times of armed conflict: the Geneva Convention quoted in ever war movie since the late 40s 
(it’s actually a suite of four, plus a couple of Additional Protocols and various Advisory Opinions, but you get the general idea). In contrast, Human Rights law is more about overarching basics and has nothing to do with war. The two are related, and that relationship took up a significant portion of the first week: how to interpret one in light of the other, and which way that works in various situations and by what principle according to whose pronouncement. It sounds simple now, but it took me an embarrassingly long time to know which was which. This first section also looked at sources of IHL, and the history of its development.
The details of IHL – types of armed conflicts (international, non-international, occupation) and forces (state forces, armed groups, terrorists) – started the second section (3 weeks) and was likewise tricky, but essential to understanding so many contemporary conflicts. Then the focus was on the Geneva Convention relating to protection of POWs and civilians, and the very complicated question of the civilian soldier. Rules of weaponry, tactics, and targeting finished up the section; much of this material was intense, particularly since things were happening in the real world at the same time: the illegal use of chemical weapons in Syria, the US bombing in response, the superbomb in Afghanistan.
The final section in weeks 6 and 7 covered the legal framework of IHL – the International Committee of the Red Cross, the International Criminal Court, the UN, individual international Tribunals and hybrid ad hoc courts – and the legal methods of sanctioning violations of IHL and prosecuting war crimes. This was a welcome relief, in terms of both workload and topic.
Each week featured several videos and readings outlining individual situations and cases. The course lists a time allowance of 6 to 8 hours a week; I estimate I spent about 12 to 14 hours a week in the middle section, a bit less elsewhere. Some of that is because of my process of obsessive note-taking, but it’s not the sort of material where I can listen to a video, read a page, and be on my way; it takes multiple plays/readings, and time to understand, incorporate, and relate to prior material. I have no legal or international background other than the one prior course; others may find it much easier. Each week also featured an extended (about a half hour) discussion with practicing IHL professionals: professors at various institutions, as well as organizational, military, and diplomatic specialists, fleshing out the academic discussion with practical considerations and the realities of the real world.
Addendum: I realized, after publishing, that I’d left out a paragraph, sorry! I did have one disappointment with this course, and that was in the reliance on lectures laden with textbook language. Given the unusual relevance of the topics covered, I wonder if it would be possible to present a more engaging class, one with opening questions and more of a conversational feel. I suspect that’s not the way they do things in law schools, but maybe a mooc should try to be a bit different. Then again, given that this is something of an extension of a bricks-and-mortar degree, it might be wise to prioritize academic tone and intent rather than try to become more accessible to less targeted interests.
Grading was divided among three sources. One or two multiple choice questions followed most videos or readings, which together counted for about roughly a third of the final grade. Each section, as outlined above, ended with an assignment: two were multiple choice, one was a peer-assessed essay (for Verified students, this was staff-graded). These also counted for about a third. The final multiple choice exam (for Verified students, another essay was added on) comprised the final third.
I was taking the “WWI and Philosophy” course concurrent with this one, which had some interesting congruences: the Clauswitz philosophy against the development of IHL, the German idealists and the Just War principle. The recent ISIS destruction of Palmyra and other cultural treasures came up in both. For the record, it was a violation of international law, but good luck enforcing that, particularly when dealing with an armed group rather than a state. And that, right there, is the main problem with IHL: while there’s no doubt the rules 
have helped to some degree to contain the suffering that comes with war, enforcement is inadequate at best. Once in a while justice can be done – we looked at tribunals regarding the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda – but mostly it’s a matter of permitting third-party attacks upon military targets in response to violations as a means of deterrence. This wasn’t glossed over in the course, by the way.
Another interesting real-life crossover – or sort of real-life: for several months I’ve been listening to a podcast covering individual episodes of the 2000-2006 TV show The West Wing. Yes, we’re weird, but some of us need some liberal porn in these times. During this course, one of the episodes discussed involved war crimes, and the podcast featured a rather extensive (for an entertainment podcast) discussion with the US former ambassador to the UN, David Pressman covering various aspects of war crimes. I was pleased to recognize so many concepts. I wish I’d been able to ask some questions about the specific incident depicted in the show (I don’t think Leo, as jet pilot, was obligated to verify his target was, in fact, military; that was his superior’s responsibility; and then there’s the retroactivity issue), but alas, the podcast upfront is one way.
This is, as I’ve said, the second of the Louvain international law courses I’ve taken. I’m still enrolled in 
the Human Rights Law segment, but it seems less approachable so I’ve left it for “someday”. The fourth segment is on investment law, a topic that carries no interest for me whatsoever. These four courses comprise the Louvain MicroMasters, which, if passed (as a Verified student, $150 fee) complete about a third of the credits necessary for a Master’s degree from Louvain (I’m not sure of the subject of the degree, I haven’t looked that closely).
Verified students had a slightly different exam path in this course: the essay for the third assignment is staff-graded rather than peer-assessed, and the final includes another staff-graded essay instead of an additional set of multiple choice questions.. I’ve been highly critical of courses that offer different assessment practices for audit and verified students (that is, those who pay and those who don’t) but here, where academic accreditation is an option, I think it’s a valid approach. 
The purpose is not to get people to pay for a certificate that’s of dubious value, but to more accurately assess students who might be using the credits earned in the degree program. It’s also a creative approach to using moocs as a supplement, rather than a replacement, to higher education, making credentials more accessible to a wider field. At least, that’s my view from well outside academia.
Even though I have no practical reason to take these courses, they’ve been helpful in seeing a larger picture and interpreting events in different ways. I probably could’ve done the same thing without quite so much work, but I like a challenge.
boil
documents displayed in the windows nearly every day as I walk down Congress Street. The timing of this course coincides with the anniversary, but this was its second run; the first was almost two years ago. 
It was, I will say, an outstandingly produced introduction. The lecture videos were nearly cinematic, with carefully chosen locations and introductory music that began as a low, ominous hum under the spoken words, then crescendoed at a well-chosen break point to develop into a lovely melancholic theme overlaid by old-style film cuts complete with blotches, pops and crackles. I was astonished at the work that must’ve gone into the timing and graphics of these intros. Some videos were “conversations” with a verité feel, filmed in a coffee shop – again, with a nicely composed introduction of umbrella’d arrival and cappuccino artistry. The production values were extraordinarily high; I just wish the lectures had been twice as long, at least. 
not lose touch, in this era of drones and air assaults launched from hundreds of miles away from the targets, in a time when most American families do not have anyone in the military, of the real pain that war entails, of the real sight, sound, and feel of death and destruction, so maybe we won’t be so eager to chant war slogans from the safety of our living rooms and offices when our pride is the only thing wounded. 
effect of the current moment, or maybe I was just missing out on some historical subtext. I wish there had been more, but I don’t know exactly what. Still, I’m glad to have some idea of the flow of ideas through the period, and I hope I can expand upon it more in the future.
might work for some people, particularly those familiar with the design and interpretation of lab assays. I probably spent more like 10 to 12 hours a week. 
helpful. The objectives serve as a blueprint for the quizzes. If it says “Predict the effect a disruption of telomerase function would have”, you can bet you’ll have to pick an assay result that shows the effect in a given situation. If an objective is “Analyze protein structure to infer functional information”, chances are good you’ll have to find a binding site that’ll work with a particular molecule. That objectives list is the study guide to the course. If you can handle that list, you’ve learned the material.
angle, what assay do you want, what reagents do you need, and what result do you expect? When your labmate Brian (oh, dear Brian, poor never-quite-right Brian, beloved by all but trusted by none) runs the assay and gets a weird result, what’s the most likely thing he did wrong? When you get stuck, the more experienced Alice will be able to glance at your results and suggest a course of action, at which point you need to figure out what she’s correcting. It’s pretty ingenious to design a quiz like this, and even more so to design it so that no subsequent questions give away the answers to prior questions (trust me, I looked). 
narrow it down a little, but that’s about it. What really freaked me out regularly is that, buried among seriously complex scenarios are some laughably simple questions. I kept thinking, This one must be a trick. No tricks, though. Just damn good test design. I don’t always feel like I’ve earned my grade in a mooc, but I sure did here. 
no control over, but that must take place in order for us to be here. The molecules keeping us alive make the Grand Canyon seem kinda small, if you ask me. 
I’ve encountered so far. That isn’t to say I was able to go much further with it, but I got a sense of what is meant by the word, anyway, and why my prior conceptualization didn’t work.
The course was divided into three modules of three to four weeks each: Form & History, The Technology Effect, and Representation & Context. A different major work was the focus for each week – Italian villas, the Pompidou Center in Paris, German factories, even Utopian city designs that were never built – with additional works brought in as supported the material. Although Dr. Hays did most of the lectures, several other instructors appeared for individual weeks. 
I didn’t really use the forums. It seemed to me there were a lot of more advanced students and I was intimidated and didn’t want to clutter things up, plus they were oddly formatted (I wish mooc designers would realize that pinning more than two or three threads is self-defeating). One comment went unnoticed, perhaps because of the forum setup, perhaps because it was too naïve for the rest of the class. This didn’t help with the intimidation factor, but that’s my problem.
conceptual images for hearth, container, framework, and wrap. I also had rather a fun time with the Barcelona Pavilion; I’m sure I missed the mark entirely, but since I come from a land of narratives, I again came up with a story of the posts pushing themselves up from the ground and being restrained from overreaching. I was a bit shocked to be reminded of this in the last week with the Berlin monument: again, a sense of reaching up from the ground, but a far more somber, and important, sense and purpose. 
provide a “democratic space” under the private space, and to allow great freedom of movement and vision. Could’ve fooled me. Did fool me. 
that means “weight”, in somewhat the same way that we know which end of an object is closer based on size differentials? 
recommended, so I spent a week trying to get a sense of the basics on Youtube (Leah Fisch’s vids, aka Leah4Sci.com, were particularly helpful). I also found a Cerego set on functional groups (Cerego’s great for pure memorization and for keeping ideas from getting all dusty between moocs), but wasn’t optimistic about my chances of completing the course. Turns out I did fine, though I suspect my final score greatly exaggerates my overall comprehension. I did get some good exposure to heretofore unknown aspects of chemistry, which was the point. And it was interesting to see the process of drug development.
and drug company CEO – both Davidson alumni – to research scientists specializing in the technical areas featured during the week . Three exams were spaced throughout the course, covering material from two or three weeks each. 
explanation and great forum support. I had a very bad moment when I saw the phrase “area under the curve” – oh god, please don’t make me integrate – but it turned out to be simplified by another formula. Derivation of the formula was part of the material, but I was not in a position to really incorporate it. And that’s part of the reason I feel my comprehension wasn’t equal to my final grade. But I survived, if less nobly than was possible, and lived to fight another day in the sections on chemical bonds and reactions. 
when it comes to putting something in my notes, a laser-printed typeset diagram beats a screen clip of a blackboard sketch every time. So the best of both worlds was provided. 
Various databases and software packages, most online (the one that was download-only was in an optional Virtual Lab), came into play, including The Drug Bank, Molinspiration, and the Protein Data Bank. I’ve used similar packages, maybe the same ones through an interface, in my biology courses. Molinspiration particularly amused me: if you draw too many bonds on a given atom, it eventually asks: “Are you trying to draw a hedgehog?” 
A pre-test and post-test bracketed the course. Neither were graded beyond a single “extra credit” point for completion. The pre-test instructions emphasized that we weren’t expected to get the questions right; it wasn’t a prerequisite test, but merely a way to establish a starting benchmark. Good thing, since I had no idea what any of the questions were asking. The post-test came after a long, hard seven weeks, and while I was feeling overwhelmed by other courses besides. I made a half-hearted attempt at the first 10 of 15 before I decided I didn’t need the extra point that badly; I was feeling pretty discouraged about my retention of the material at that point. 
his hoped-for growth level. I’ll never know, since the scores aren’t revealed. I hope, at the very least, I didn’t drag down the group average too much. The course deserved better than that. 
and language, and of studying religious texts, new and old, through the digital humanities technique I’ve previously seen described as corpus linguistics. I even got the verdict on remote prayer (spoiler alert: contrary to that episode of The West Wing, it’s not scientifically verifiable). The material only grazed the surface of most of these questions, but there’s only so much you can do in six weeks and they went for breadth rather than depth. I found it fascinating. 
practical evolutionary value? What cognitive elements do religions have in common? What are the psychological benefits to religion? How does religion affect communities? Can we study religious development by examining religious texts of the past? Can we design models to predict religious development? What about atheism, how does that fit in? What is most likely to happen to religion in the future?
long list of references for further reading. And to my delight, as in the Chinese Thought course, a weekly “blooper reel” brought the funny. Neither of the instructors comes across as pedantic or stuffy – quite the contrary – but it’s still nice to know even seriously smart people screw up. Sometimes repeatedly. And they manage to maintain a sense of humor about it.
courses are finding ways to tuck course material behind paywalls. It wasn’t lack of access to the material that bothered me – I rarely participate in hangouts, though I like to watch them, but here there was more than enough material to keep me very busy – as much as the harbinger of things to come. I have no idea what kind of incentives or restrictions are part of the package these days for course presenters, but I’m guessing it’s persuasive.
the enormous crowds gathering from the early hours and the respectful and celebratory atmosphere, all featured generous phalanxes of soldiers and police. I looked through some images of typical Fourth of July celebrations in Washington, DC, but I wouldn’t draw any conclusions based on such a casual experiment. 
and philosophy. In spite of, or perhaps because of the strong point of view differing from the one I’ve been exposed to in the US, I enjoyed the material, particularly the more philosophical mentions of how Chinese Marxism blended in both Confucius and the Dao and evolved over time to form its own flavor of socialism. But I still think far too much was skimmed over, even for a basic overview course. 
Muslim game, carved from an elephant’s trunk so large, the curve isn’t apparent, likewise appropriated during conquest; silver dishes and gold pendants found buried by the Jews of Briviesca when their homes were burned in the (dashed) hopes they could return to claim their family treasures. I kept remembering Ta-Nehisi Coates’ theory that racism is fundamentally about plunder, and hate is just a means to that end. It was a bit creepy to be taking this course while, in the US, Jewish community centers were receiving bomb threats in escalating numbers, several Jewish cemeteries were vandalized, and at least two people were murdered because they looked Muslim (turns out, they weren’t, but that’s beside the point). Even in Canada, slaughter broke out at a mosque. This is why we must know history, because we are living it, repeating it right now, and we can change that if we are willing.
of the recommended SILReST technique (Scan, Identify easy letters, Locate common words, Recognize abbreviations, etc). I have a feeling manuscript transcription is one of those things I just have to keep doing until I get the hang of it and can “see” words instead of squiggles. I’d spent several hours working on a French poem during the previous class, but didn’t get very far so I finally found someone who could help. Google Translate is useless, since abbreviations are used frequently, the spellings are often archaic, and just figuring out which letters are written is a major challenge in the first place. 
and “i” overly compressed), which is the medieval version of ciudad, city, emphasized by its proximity to the abbreviated form of Burgos. Yes, this is what I consider fun, you got a problem with that? 
Welcome to the Cathedral of Burgos. The Cathedral is the guardian of almost 1000 years of history. The memory of long ago lives still reside here, their hopes and worries, their friendships and enmities, their commitments and broken promises. Patiently they wait, wait to commune with us. Perhaps they walk alongside of us, here in the cloister, escorting us past guarded areas, whisking us past heavy doors, carefully guiding us past the realm of natural light, step by step, an to the home of memories: to the cathedral’s archive.
By coincidence, at the same time the Citizen Scholar program was unfolding, I got an email from my local library about a similar 
they really put a lot of work into their moocs. I mean, just the 
by the way. And Prof. Xu had previously discovered a new species, Gigantoraptor, among collected fossils from Erlian. They were joined by several other scientists during the course, some in the field, others in classrooms, museums, and labs.
In other words, I really needed to create an overal taxonomy, but when I went looking for one, I found lots of conflicting information so I never got there. (addendum: during the last days of the course, I noticed a poster with a taxonomic layout was stored in a section of the course I hadn’t visited; I don’t know if it was there all along, but it’s exactly what I was looking for). I also should have made a chart for all the critters, with information about size, earliest and latest fossils, eating habits, etc. etc., but I didn’t do that either. I didn’t put enough effort into making the course meaningful to me, and that’s my fault. I feel like I let down the graphic designers who put so much work into a scientifically accurate logo.
As I write this post, I’m beginning to see that I did pick up more than I’d realized from the course, and greatly enjoyed many aspects of it (which is one reason I write these posts). HKU has a great 
About once a decade, I check to see if I still can’t play the guitar (I could when I was 16, but I seem to have lost it shortly thereafter), and more often I try to do some kind of visual art to see if I’ve suddenly developed some artistic sense (I haven’t). It was worth a try to see if I could get interested in dinosaurs, and if anyone could lure me in, it would’ve been these guys. I guess it’s just not to be. Foraminifera, maybe…
Einstein to the present day. Prof. Gleiser is a theoretical physicist specializing in particle cosmology, and the course roughly follows his 
Each week started with a great feature: an ungraded What Do You Know pretest, full of questions that range from factual (T/F: Violet light has more energy than red light) to conceptual opinion (Agree/disagree: Mathematics is something we invent; Reality only exists in our minds). These questions are repeated at the end of the week, offering concrete evidence that something was, indeed, learned, even if only a better definition of “reality”. Material also included a video lecture and several interviews with other philosophers and scientists on the topics covered. A few graded multiple-choice questions were scattered through the material, along with several short written assignments in the form of posts, journal entries, and short self-graded essays. A Reddit AMA with Prof. Gleiser finished off the week. 
The discussion forums were active and I got into some excellent discussions along the way. I also enjoyed a project from the first week: understanding a pendulum’s motion. Now, I took the easy route and used the available online pendulum simulator, because I’m a klutz, but it was an interesting way to play around with the topic of observation and experiment. 
answering questions (though I never did find the Learning Journal). I say that a lot, don’t I. In this case, the multiple evaluation options were complicated by a bilingual approach: the course was offered in Portuguese as well as English, with all written material in both languages so everything appeared twice. I wholeheartedly support broadening the appeal to include more people worldwide, and I would rather deal with my befuddlement than restrict the audience. It’s a tough problem, and I applaud them for taking it on. I got used to the double-entries after just a few weeks; if more courses took this approach, we’d all get used to it, and it’s a small price to pay for inclusion of those who would otherwise be unable to participate.
mentioned in Week 3: Steven Greenblatt’s The Swerve: How the World Became Modern . I’ve only gone through 80 pages, but it’s wonderful: Poggio, Medieval Book-Raider, goes among the monks to rediscover Lucretius and atomism as Europe turned towards renaissance. Manuscripts, history, philosophy, science, the classics, all packaged in a wonderfully told story: who could ask for more. 
I should say that I suspect the course has been pared down from the version I took back then. I don’t remember it as being two parts, I remember it as being longer, and I remember it as having a lot more complicated material, so it’s possible the part that was so difficult just wasn’t included in this run. In that case, I’ll have to see what happens when Part 2 rolls around. 
did some of the labs the first time around, and they’re quite useful for anyone practicing for future lab science courses, as they require record keeping and hypothesizing. And they’re fun, or what most people would see as more fun than calculating moles and temperature diffusion. Because of the grade structuring, it’s possible to completely skip the traditional problem-solving homework and just do the practical aspects, and still pass the course.
Ungraded review materials offer extra practice in math and the very basic levels of science: density, concentrations and so on. Last time, I found these oppressive and this time they were a snap (though they are still very casual about rounding and significant figures). Personally, I’d rather use my own stash of materials collected from Youtubers over the past several years, and Khan Academy is great for isolated subjects, but it’s all there for anyone who wants it. There’s also a section of advanced materials more in line with traditional science courses – mostly readings, with ungraded problems –for those who want to better understand the equations (and it’s possible some of the earlier material has been moved there), so there’s a broad range of appeal for students from various mathematical and scientific comfort levels. 
on Youtube in one form or another; every once in a while I pull up a tape and watch something amazing (and I see Top Chef‘s Voltaggio brothers are now in the mix). 
Then came the Global Middle Ages 
The Manuscript section included two options for peer-assessed projects that ran the length of the course, and again, only one was required. I did both, because how am I supposed to know before I do it what will be more beneficial? As it turns out, both of the peer-assessed projects were extremely beneficial, though in very different ways; I’m very glad I did them both.
The other project option was to make a reasonable approximation of a medieval manuscript, within practical limits of budget, material availability, time, and skill. In other words, we weren’t expected to skin a cow to make parchment, nor were we expected to create beauty (a lot of my classmates did so anyway) but only to demonstrate that we understood the procedures and knew the difference between authentic techniques and our shortcuts. Again, I was quite cynical at first, since we started by staining one side of our writing support with coffee to simulate the difference between the flesh and hair side of parchment (the Middle Ages were not for the squeamish) but I ended up putting a lot of thought and work into making quires, designing page layout and prepping, writing, illustrating, and binding my manuscript. It’s pretty much refrigerator art, but it’s MY refrigerator art, and dammit, I’m proud of myself for having managed to get it done at all. In fact… I’ve started working on a second one. I know how to avoid a few pitfalls now, so I hope it will look better.
humor, this gives a little window on medieval life: there were libraries, women borrowed books (this one is a poetic 
It seems some parchment was sometimes was damaged in the curing-stretching-drying process, as it was repeatedly scraped to remove hair and flesh 
(not for the squeamish, this manuscript stuff). Modern repairs could be quite lovely, but sometimes the original scribes took matters into their own hands an incorporated holes into the writing of the books (images from Erik Kwakkel’s 
In spite of the few drawbacks, this course was very much worthwhile, and I’m glad I signed up. I’m going to miss it! To fill the void, I’m taking one of the 
understanding of the complement cascade leading to MAC attack though I didn’t get to the point of memorizing the pathways – but still ended up scrambling for a lot of detail I seem to have overlooked. On the plus side, I’ve done enough medical reading to be perfectly comfortable with the overall physiological mechanisms of myasthenia gravis and lupus etc., so until we got to which cytokines or antibodies or receptors were involved, I could relax for a while. I passed with room to spare, but I wouldn’t say I’m secure in the subject. It’s more like I understand the general outline of what’s involved, and I now have the background to nail down the details more firmly. But for a free 4-week course, that’s plenty. 
transplant issues. Each week included practice questions and a weekly exam, and some weeks had review exams of prior material (a terrific idea; I wish more courses did this). Week 5 was for self-review and the final exam. 
that required analysis or synthesis of information in light of the concepts presented. Sometimes the question structure itself was a little weird, but it’s all about being able to manipulate the material. The final exam was also multiple choice, but allowed only one try, and counted for 50% of the grade, so guessing doesn’t work as an overall strategy (not that I’ve ever understood why anyone would bother to fake his way through a mooc, but it happens). I loved that the 40-question final was broken down in to 8 parts of 5 questions each. Not only is it less likely to trigger panic (oh my god, look at all these questions, how will I ever do them all?!?), but it forces kind of mini-reviews along the way. 
were supposed to in the Week 0 period, intended only for review of the outlines from the previous two courses (which, as someone who didn’t take the earlier courses, I found helpful, but nowhere near sufficient as preparation for this segment, by the way). They did an admirable job keeping up with unexpected but eager hordes of students flooding the forums before staff was in place. A few answer-coding problems cropped up throughout the course in ungraded sections. But overall, the execution was great. They really put a lot of thought into the images used, and I found it helpful in remembering what roles individual cells played in the immune process.
the immune system. I’ve had these vague notions of B cells and T cells, but I’m always amazed, whenever I take a biology course, that anything ever works – do you know how many millions of things have to happen for you to just go on living? – and the interactions of all the moving parts are fascinating. I’m eager to take the first two courses when they roll around again (and possibly retake this one, since I’ll be much better prepared). I understand there’s also a fourth part coming, The Immune System Fights Back. That sounds like fun. 
I haven’t been paying much attention to Coursera since they went with this new platform. But I do follow professors and departments from past moocs, and since I’ve taken a couple of Edinburgh philosophy courses, a series of cute tweets about Icarus and intellectual humility came across my feed and made me curious. 
As is usual with Edinburgh courses, I found the overall course structure a bit confusing. They admirably try to accommodate different levels of interest and experience by dividing each week into Learn, Engage, and Go Further sections, but there are tradeoffs. It’s kind of hard to tell, but only the Learn part is required to “pass” if a certificate is all that’s desired. It’s pretty disconcerting when a notice suddenly pops up: “You’ve passed Week 2” – or worse, “You’ve passed the course!” – when half of the items on the task list were still undone. It’s not exactly conducive to covering the “Go Further” material. 
The point of intellectual humility seems to be to get people to be more open minded and willing to look at facts instead of relying on things like “the people I like believe this so I do to” or “this is what my parents told me so it must be right” or “Gee, if that other thing is true, I’d have to change how I live, and I don’t want to do that so it must be false.” Good luck with that. The course results from a grant by the John Templeton 
on measuring intellectual humility as well, though it seems it’s mostly in the self-report stage. I also liked that each week opened with a very brief introduction of the subject, followed by an opportunity to explore ideas without worrying about grades: short answer questions on, say, how intellectual humility could be measured.
or affects, the world. Issues of cross-cultural translation, colonialism, cultural imitation, and national literary ethos of various eras and places predominate, as interpreted through various authors’ experiences of living in one, two, or multiple countries. 
I chose to take this as a “recreational mooc” and thus didn’t read much beyond a page or two of the works I hadn’t already read. Fortunately, I’d encountered most of them before. I also didn’t participate in the forums, though they were active and well-covered by staff. A multiple-choice information-retrieval style graded quiz finished off each week and constituted the grading for the course. I found the questions were well-selected to emphasize the main points of the interviews and discussions, and beyond covering the works themselves also covered the discovery and translation of older works, to authorial biography with more contemporary authors when those details impacted upon the literary outlook.
as well as a walk through other areas connected with his work. During the week of The Odyssey, Prof. Puchner generously braved sailing the Aegean Sea 😉 to demonstrate Homer’s settings. Most interesting to me, we saw a lot of Istanbul during the week covering Orhan Pamuk; I’ll say more about this presently. 
I greatly enjoyed learning about Wole Soyinka through his Death of a Horseman. Since I’m not only unfamiliar with the work, but also unfamiliar with drama as a genre, and even more unfamiliar with the Nigerian rituals he incorporates into his work alongside British ritual, this was all new discovery. How fitting that during the course, Soyinka, who was once exiled from Nigeria for criticizing the government, who has held professorships at Cornell, Emory, and various other American universities, and has lectured at Harvard, Yale, etc etc., 
Another particularly insightful week covered Orhan Pamuk’s works. Again, I plead ignorance (I seem to need to beef up my reading of Nobel Prize winners) coming into the course, but I’m fascinated by the foundations of the two works discussed. In My Name is Red he uses the 16th century Ottoman Empire as a setting for a story about painting, and the transition from Persian miniatures, which use a top-of-the-minaret point of view and idealized style, to Venetian realism as a vehicle for discussing the change in Turkish culture in the 20th century after the breakup of the Ottoman Empire at the end of WWI. I hadn’t realized the secularization and modernization of the “Young Turks” had included changing the alphabet; that’s quite a lot to deal with. Here in the US we’ve never been able to adjust to the metric system, I can’t imagine if someone tried to change the alphabet on us. 
‘m going to have to read these books. They’re the only new-to-me works from the course that I have a real desire to explore further. I’m intimidated, however; I’m not sure I’m up to such masterworks. We’ll see.
concepts, that did me the most good. And reading fiction, because putting myself in someone else’s head is good practice for everything.
Wall. Lockerbie. Legal cases resulting from these events featured prominently, usually with a very narrow focus on one particular legal issue or UN action, but it would’ve helped if I’d had more background. Fortunately, there’s Google, and it’s just a matter of finding a reliable source.
WWI within barely a generation, and we still feel the aftereffects of the reshuffling of borders made in that room. We were invited to create our own image of International Law; I chose a proportional infogram of world languages. I wonder what kind of image the words will generate four years from now, given current trends and circumstances.
and how law happens to begin with. I’m not sure who the intended audience is – law students? Lawyers? Policy aides? The general public? – but I was so pleased with the course, I’ve signed up for two of the subsequent modules on International Humanitarian, and Human Rights law. I’d say that constitutes a high recommendation for those interested in the topics covered – but be prepared to work.
license for Matlab is included, ending when the course is over. Staff coverage of the forums was excellent. A PDF of some material is provided, but they presuppose viewing the videos, and as usual with any math course, the video transcripts aren’t all that helpful without the videos. Disclaimer: I only made it through the middle of Week 8. 
was something I was missing, but I never really understood what. 
I’ve been hearing so many mathy people talk about how cool linear algebra is, and the course description includes “It’s visual” as a selling point. Other than Timmy, and a brief graphical description of two-rotation transformations, the only visuals I saw were printouts of algorithms and matrices, endless matrices to partition, multiply, transform. Maybe it got more visual in week 8, but I just didn’t want to do any more. 
I’ve never thought of myself as someone who needs to be entertained in order to engage, but maybe I am, more than I’d like to admit, at least where math is concerned. And I admit I am somewhat spoiled by the truly exceptional moocs I’ve been fortunate enough to take. It’s also possible I no longer have the attention span for a longer course, especially one that requires so much of my time and fully focused attention over an extended period, since I was quite content for several weeks. I can sometimes skim through a philosophy or history lecture, but I have to pay attention to every detail when it comes to math, and it’s hard to sustain, even when I’m into it. And, of course, it’s very possible that, contrary to the Howling Stanfordtoids and their growth mindset, I’m just stupider than I think I am.
algebra, and a couple of OCWs (I have trouble with OCWs; I can never figure out how to navigate them, where all the pieces are), and I’m finding that the initial material from LAFF has helped enormously. And, by the way, I think I finally understand mathematical induction thanks to this course, or at least I understood its use in the cases encountered here. So I’m glad I did as much as I did, and I hope to some day pick it up again.
I find the MIT courses have an odd structure in terms of how weeks, modules, and lectures are subdivided, but it boils down to lecture/quizlet/essay. The lectures are broken into short segments, and classroom discussion videos are interspersed. Most videos are followed by a couple of graded questions. Three 800 word essays round out the evaluation materials, but they’re self-graded unless you want to pay $300 for the “human-graded” (for some reason I find that phrase hilarious) option. I skipped the last essay out of sheer laziness. I’m not doing this for grades, and I’ve been rather low on motivation of all kinds since November 8.
In spite of my seeming lack of enthusiasm, I think this actually works quite well as a first “serious” philosophy course. I like the use of actual papers (or translations thereof) rather than explanations accompanied by a quote or two; I also like the pursuit of a topic through argument A, refutation, counterargument, argument B, etc. And I like the focus on the logical argument being made, rather than the “gee whiz, what is the mind anyway” approach – and hey, I like that kind of thing, it’s fun and a great way to play with ideas, it’s just easy to get disorganized and end up not knowing what it is you just learned. So it’s really a pretty good class; I just wish I’d taken it a couple of years ago.