Course: The Book of Kells: Exploring an Irish Medieval Masterpiece
Length: 4 weeks, 4 hrs/wk
School/platform: Trinity College Dublin/Futurelearn
Instructor: Rachel Moss, Fáinche Ryan
Quote:The Book of Kells manuscript, housed at Trinity College Dublin is world-famous – it attracts almost one million visitors a year. But what can this book tell us about Irish history? And what significance is the manuscript in today’s world?
On this course you will use the Book of Kells as a window through which to explore the landscape, history, faith, theology, and politics of early medieval Ireland. You will also consider how the manuscript was made, its extended biography and how it has affected different areas of the contemporary world.
About a year ago, I wished there could be a mooc focusing in detail on an individual manuscript, its history, text, and images. And guess what popped up last week! This was a lot of fun.
Week 1 was a general introduction to the Book of Kells, which until embarrassingly recently I thought was something like The Book of Runes, with kells as a form of ancient alphabet. No, no, no: the book is a four-volume compendium of the Gospels, and Kells is the town of the monastery where the book was probably partly written, then was housed (and stolen! but recovered) for centuries. Written about 800 CE (a 1200 year old book!), it has a complex history, and in the 17th century was given to the Trinity College library where it is on exhibit to the public. It’s become a prominent symbol of Ireland and an example of the earliest Irish art.
Week 2 covered aspects of manuscript creation. This was more superficial than I’d hoped, but that’s probably because I’ve taken a couple of fairly detailed courses including things like vellum production and scripting. The material pointed out the use of orpiment, a highly toxic yellow pigment used instead of gold leaf; the effect, at least in 
digitalized images, is remarkably similar. For someone not that familiar with, or interested in, manuscript production, this might be just the right depth.
The third week was where I focused my attention: the religious significance of the images. I was aware that fish were long associated with Christianity (though I’d never seen them used as abbreviation bars before), and three dots for the Trinity made sense (how they ended up as pawn shop markers I don’t know), but other things were brand new to me. I seem to have a lot of trouble “seeing” chalices, though the vines are usually pretty evident, and I’m still not sure which blobs are peacocks and which are just blobs. The illustrations are gorgeous; there’s a reason, besides age, that this is one of the most famous manuscripts in Europe.
Week 4 looked at how the book became a symbol of Irish culture, from the knot imagery to its incorporation into literature – everything from James Joyce to Guardians of the Galaxy. More about its display was explained, including the Turning of the Page every eight weeks or so: each of the four volumes is kept in a glass case to protect it from the elements, but different pages are displayed throughout the year. And of course the pages have been digitized and can be viewed online for those of us not planning to visit Ireland in the near future.
I haven’t used Futurelearn in quite some time, but this I just couldn’t pass up. They have chosen a different way to encourage the purchase of certificates ($74 for this particular course); free course materials are only available for the length of the course, and while there were quizzes for each week’s material, there is no grading. I treated this as a recreational mooc, as opposed to an academic one. I was most interested in book construction, which was covered less thoroughly than other courses I’ve taken, and 
iconography, which was marvelous and memorable; I also pasted lost of images into my notes for future reference.
I’m so glad I stumbled across this course; I’d recommend it to anyone interested in Irish history, religious imagery, or manuscripts in general.
used by Handel and others early in the period, and the more melodic and dramatic style that emerged later with Mozart, culminating in Don Giovanni.
Overall the course is probably best described as music appreciation: a conversational approach to the music’s history, the stage presentation, the conventions of singing and stage performance at the time, explanations of why the opera was written to begin with, and details of the opening night performances. Much of it is told in an anecdotal manner rather than the typical lecture style. A few questions, mostly multiple choice (but a couple aiming for listening skills) follow each video. For me, it was a recreational mooc, a wonderful way to wind down for an hour or so at the end of the day.
some arias from another dozen, but you’d have to chain me to my seat to get me to sit through Fidelio again (the first time I saw it at least I was at Tanglewood, which is beautiful no matter what’s playing). The truism that understanding changes attitudes is a truism for a reason: it’s true. And if Prof. Kelly ever explains Wagner, well, I just might surprise myself by liking that, too. And oh, by the way – there’s a 19th century session in the works. I can’t wait! 
Length: 6 weeks, 4-6 hrs/wk (New session starts Oct. 13, 2018)
The course is structured so that all the lectures are presented for the week, at which point I would feel generally confused. I felt like I was missing an overview, a sense of where we were going, the connective tissue of narrative. But I have learned patience, and it paid off: the lectures were followed by three problem sets of non-graded practice questions, complete with answers and varying degrees of detailed explanation. This is where the course really worked well for me: doing these questions – or in many cases, not doing them because I didn’t know what to do at first – and reviewing the given solutions made sense of the lectures. I do wish there had been a few “basic nuts and bolts” questions after each video, but that’s me. 
Because it took me a while to catch on to the rhythm of the course, I think I still have more to learn from the first weeks in particular, which is why I signed up again. It will also be helpful to have forums for questions (I still don’t think I fully understand how to calculate variance, particularly using the “diagonal” approach shown in the video), though I found I could get most of my questions answered through old forum posts. 
along the line, since often I didn’t figure out how something worked until the last question, but there were no further questions on that aspect to make sure I knew what I was doing. 
Course: 
It’s a short course, three weeks (there is a Week 0, for purposes of getting used to the edX platform, but there’s no content). There’s very little solid content; it’s mostly open response to acted-out scenarios and discussions of the issues raised. Ostensibly the weeks had different foci, but I found it all to boil down to: keep an eye on your assumptions, notice when you’re being triggered by a difficult patient, and think about what isn’t being said as well as what is being said. The instructors were mostly emergency room physicians, a setting that often requires action when there isn’t a lot of time to gather a great deal of data. 
The acted-out scenarios in W1 and 2 were dramatic as conflicts arose between patients and staff, patients and their families, families and staff. I very much liked the Week 3 exercise, in which an abstract painting was the focus: what story do you see in the painting? Look at the negative space (I had trouble with this; I didn’t see any negative space). Map one of the patient scenarios to the painting in a way that makes sense to you. 
My main thought was: I wonder how possible any of this approach is in the current healthcare system, which focuses on efficiency and cost-effectiveness. Insurance companies and accountants have reduced primary care physicians to something like data entry clerks, and socioeconomic factors more than medical factors impact patient decisions. 
I took a class similar to this one in college, but of course that was a very long time ago. I tracked down the textbook through my library, a thousand-page-in-tiny-print-on-onionskin compilation of Profound Thoughts from creation to last week (I had a book very much like this in college, too). Alas, I confess, I did very little of the reading. I’m not 20 years old any more (not that I was 20 years old in college, either; it took me a while to get there), after all. 
genius, well, it’s probably because you don’t have little kids. Tony the Tow Truck is a picture book for toddlers, clocking in at about 188 words total. In keeping with Russian formalism, Prof. Fry parsed it linguistically (the repeated “t” sounds common in folklore), psychologically (the narcissism of the repeated “I” sentences and the return to an earlier, safer state), socially (the snooty cars that won’t help Tony, and the friend that will), and in terms of identity and community (relationships). It’s kind of amazing. I wrote papers like this. I always thought it was sophistry. 
Of course, there are no tests or quizzes, and it’s purely a solo effort with no other students. I’ve tried to get others interested, but no one wants to play. 
Course: 
As it turned out, the mooc was a broad overview of the major themes and techniques, consisting of a total of about 2 hours of videos in 15-minute stints. The additional work included annotating the poem for specific features (highlight indications it is an Epic, that Satan is a hero in the opening books, etc). This required using an annotation package that afforded the opportunity to see others’ annotations. I hate this sort of thing, so I skipped it. The other coursework was mandatory discussion posts, which I also skipped. 
fact, an extreme radical, since he called for beheading King Charles I, which eventually happened in the English Civil War. And, oh yeah, he had daddy issues, one of the recurrent phrases in Overly Sarcastic Production’s very sarcastic (and irreverent, and hilarious, but not inaccurate) 
Courses:
The first mooc examines a pair of manuscripts describing the Second Temple in Jerusalem, and the Tabernacle (a temporary and portable version used before the Temple was built, particularly during the forty years the Hebrews wandered around the Sinai). The second mooc looks at a codex with three different manuscripts on medieval medical practices, and uses these as a way to trace the flow of ideas from Galen to the Islamicate to Europe. 
end-page glossaries include local dialect vocabularies for practitioners who need to buy these substances from Italian vendors. 
renowned physician/philosopher Avicenna came along and wrote an even better text, overshadowing Majusi’s work and pushing him into relative historic obscurity. 
pertinent sections of the manuscript are embedded in the videos. Links to the complete digitized manuscripts from the Penn collection are hard to find, but they’re there (check the Syllabus). 
I almost missed these offerings entirely. edX hasn’t publicized the current Tabernacle course at all (I saw it on a tweet by Class Central), and it was only through the Syllabus that I learned about the Jewish Medicine course. That’s a shame, since they’re terrific. I’ve been a bit of a snob about mini-moocs (I’ve called them “Youtube plus a quiz”) but I have to re-think that. For anyone interested in Jewish cultural history, medieval medicine, or manuscript studies, these are tiny little gems. 
biology, and chemistry, it pretty much started where my knowledge starts to thin out, and covered quite a bit. It is intended as an intro to physiology, so there’s a lot more detail left for future explorations. The material offers it as a good review for the MCATs, so that’s probably a good estimate of the level: some background is necessary, but we’re still in undergrad territory.
The remaining nine weeks all covered different organ systems. There was a lot of overlap, but it was handled very smoothly. We started with nervous system and senses, then moved into muscles (which of course require some understanding of the nervous system), then heart (which requires some understanding of nerves and muscles)… you get the idea. 
The lectures were a bit uneven. Some of them were great; others were hard to follow, and at some point became a flood of words. The transcripts weren’t much help in this case since they contained all the hesitations, restarts, half-thoughts abandoned in mid-word, but without the auditory clues to ignore them. However, what was very helpful was a lecture note summary outlining the lecture material. These were at a higher academic level, without a lot of preparation or metaphor to help with understanding, but combined with the lectures I found them invaluable. I wish I’d started using them before the last couple of weeks (stubbornness is my downfall again). Yet, again, I found the content to be great, which made up for any quirks of delivery. Example: I’ve been struggling with the different hormones secreted by the three layers of the adrenal cortex for years now, but one phrase – “salt, sugar, sex” – clarified everything. 
I found the quiz material – some graded, some not – to be very well designed. Rather than a recitation of facts, most of the questions asked us to extrapolate from the pathways and processes covered and predict or explain the result of some action. I used Cerego for the rote stuff, but the in-video questions, the post-lecture practice quizzes, and unit exams were excellent opportunities to turn rote into reasoning. Example: “Increased delivery of Na+ to the principal cells of the renal tubule leads to increased…?” I was expecting one answer, but it wasn’t in the list; it took a bit of doing, but I realized another answer was, indeed, correct (and, in fact, turned out to be clearly stated in a lecture, though, hey, I can’t remember everything, y’know). Some units had fewer practice quizzes than others; I missed them terribly. It’s not just 
that I’m weird and I like taking tests (which, well, yeah, why take a course if there’s no test?), it’s that it really helped point out exactly what I needed to understand better, before getting to the end of the unit. 
I’ve overall been quite pleased with Duke courses, particularly their neuro and medical options; this one was no exception. At times things could get a bit wordy, but if the goal is to understand the basics of how the body works, this fits the bill very nicely. 
survey courses, that I prefer depth to breadth. Still, while there were a few “catalog lectures” early on (this god does that, this demon does the other thing), I found many of the units quite interesting – and last three weeks were great.
adaptations, was particularly rich in this. I was a bit surprised gods, angels, and demons weren’t explicitly connected across cultures (the nature theme, for example), since it seemed to me there were obvious similarities and differences. I probably should have been more active on the forums to discuss these.
the way). I found the lectures on Buddhism to be nearly incomprehensible (I stuck with my interpretation – Buddha was an agnostic who incorporated Hindu gods as a marketing tool – and moved on), but 23 out of 24 is still excellent any way you cut it. 
evolving story of the acheiropoieton, the miraculous portrait of Jesus “not painted by human hands”, to be of great interest. I also loved the last week, a more in-depth case study of another continuing saga of a miracle, this one from Coptic Egypt involving the moving of a mountain. Manuscripts got into the act, and, well, manuscripts, what else can I say. I feel like I finally have some understanding of Copts beyond “Egyptian Christians.” That, to me, is the real value of these types of courses: we feel more connected to places we’ll probably never go, places like the Muqattam area of Cairo, Ise in Japan, Armenia, and Georgia. These days, we need all the connection we can get. 
including archaeology, history in general, the history of ideas, the history of religions, the history of literature, and the branch of philology called textual criticism or (in a larger sense), textual scholarship.” Oooh, now there’s a mooc I want to take! We got a glimpse of this during the last two weeks, in the tracing of the miraculous portrait and the moving of the mountain. I hope to discover more along those lines in future moocs. 
some basics I needed to review, and went just a little beyond my comfort zone. Both the “how it works” and the “how to do it” were covered clearly. There was enough repetition to build a kind of security, in both explanation and exercises. An occasional hint of goofiness made it fun. I got lost a couple of times, but plenty of signposts helped me find my way back. Perfect.
The seven units that comprised the course were released two at a time. I see now that each unit was expected to take two weeks (I really MUST start paying attention to introductory material and instructions) but I had no problem completing it all in four weeks. Each lesson, usually three or four per unit, featured a lecture video that gave the basics of the concepts to be covered, showed how important formulas were derived, and ran through an example or two. Each of these lessons was followed by a short set of 2 to 4 practice exercises, complete with an “office hours” step-by-step video, usually showing a slightly different way of working the problem than was presented in the lecture (I could have used a couple more of these in some units, but it was sufficient as is). Each unit ended with an evaluation problem set covering all the lessons of the week. The instructors were all personable and relatable; diagrams helped concretize abstract ideas, and little drawings brought in a little fun. 
The practice exercises made up 20% of the grade – and, since they were mostly multiple choice and allowed unlimited attempts, were more or less “gimme” points. The weekly evaluations, also multiple choice but allowing 2 attempts, counted for 80%. 
The third unit covered the basics of probability, which boils down to: success over possibility, with slightly different twists depending on whether you’re dealing with coins, dice, or cards. Then we got into expected value in the fourth unit – why slot machines are a losing game – a topic I’ve seen several times in various contexts. Conditional probability in unit 5 – the Monty Hall problem, election probability – got a little scary but made sense. The sixth unit on Bernoulli Trials was one place I got lost – it was where I completely dropped the ball in a prior class – but eventually I caught on. Normal distribution, likewise, was tricky, but thanks to the Office Hours videos, I was able to work my way through it. 
I found this course extremely helpful in my continuing struggle to learn math, any math. I’m still concerned, because my grasp of all this is very context-dependent. For instance, I don’t really see the connection between Bernoulli trials, random walks, and distributions as covered in earlier classes, and as covered here. Maybe that means I just need to get a wider view.
is new material, but I’m betting it’s going to be worth it either way. [Addendum: The “Look! Animations!” teaser was bait-and-switch; this was seriously mathy stuff, theorems and proofs and now go figure out what to do with them. I got through the first two weeks just fine, but really, seriously crashed and burned on week 3; week 4 only got worse, so I went looking for a different sequel, and found Purdue’s course; it’s archived, so there’s no support, but it’s working out a little better]
Each of the 13 weekly lessons consisted of two or three academic papers, and about 45 minutes of lecture divided into two videos. The videos were mostly voice-overs covering prepared slides (available as a separate download). You could read the transcripts, download the slides, and read the articles without watching the videos at all. The lectures were well-organized and followed the slides very closely. 
Week 1 started with a general look at human rights. Week 2 got into Locke, Hobbes, Marx, and all of the usual suspects (I’ve taken several political philosophy OCWs and the same crew always shows up), negative and positive rights. Mary Wollstonecraft was included, which was nice, since all lectures included the caveat that rights, as declared by the “classic liberals”, were for white property-owning men only (Jeet Heer would approve). In Week 3 the process of drafting and approving the UN Declaration on Human Rights was covered, along with its major provisions. 
All of these held interesting material. For example, the indigenous section was taught by Carol Dowling, a professor of aboriginal descent whose twin sister Julie is an artist painting pieces that the experience of the Australian aboriginal peoples and their family specifically. The section on rights for the Disabled included a TED talk by journalist/teacher/comedian Stella Young, who I’ve seen before in several venues; she passed away in 2014. The week on asylum seekers and refugees was heart-wrenching, given the frustration level I and so many Americans feel about our current administration’s refusal to provide more assistance. 
Length: 4 weeks, 5 – 10 hrs/wk
I spend a lot of time thinking about literature, I started thinking about narrative. This is what happens when a course lacks narrative. It isn’t necessarily deal-breaker – the information is there and, drawing upon experience and using other techniques to stay oriented and motivated, it’s workable – but it certainly is a less pleasant, less engaging experience. 
hours per week – would be a bit tight for anyone trying to learn the material. It would be possible to pass the course in that time frame; it’s possible to pass most Coursera courses these days without even taking the courses, because you have unlimited tries at the exams. But learning the material? Getting a good picture in your head of what’s posterior to what and how nerves and arteries branch off? Recognizing structures on dissections? I suspect, for most of us who aren’t in medical school, that takes longer. I entered a lot of material into Cerego, so that took a great deal of time, but it also helped with retention (and will continue to remind me for months to come), and I consider it time well spent. 
anyway and roll over into the next session without penalty if they aren’t completed by the end date). Several videos covered imaging techniques – x-ray, CT, MRI, and ultrasound – from a light overview of technical foundations to a guide to reading images. It’s kind of a kick to see an MRI on Grey’s Anatomy and know, “Oh, that’s with IV contrast, supine.” And it’s really fun to hear Dr. Bailey refer to the SMA or the IVC and know what that is. 
to continue. The chest would be incised, the skin peeled back, the muscles examined, explained, and reflected one by one, the bones sawed through and removed, and the deeper structures pointed out. This was a lot more helpful than an isolated labeled photograph of a dissection. Material also included endoscopic videos from bronchoscopy, upper and lower GI screening endoscopies, cystoscopy, and a laparoscopic gallbladder removal. And if you stick with it to the very end, you can see a penis dissected. Longitudinally, then transversely. I may never eat kielbasa again. 
procedure videos). I found these quite difficult. First, there’s my difficulty telling a preserved nerve from a vein from an artery from a tendon, and second, the clickable areas were sometimes oddly construed. There was a kind of logic to it once I figured out any given structure; I could relate everything else to it. These tests weren’t graded other than for completion. 
order to translate it into verbal description. In general, I’d say the testing material was effective at reinforcing learning.
their entirety, the course focused on specific sections as exemplars of various points; individual chapters or short groups of chapters were the only assigned reading. 
And yes, since there were a lot of unfamiliar names, and since this was material I want to retain long-term, I used Cerego, so I’ll be getting questions about “Handing Grettir Around” periodically over the next year (you’ll have to take the course to see why that’s such a delightfully amusing prospect). This was particularly helpful when the final exam rolled around, since I’d been seeing the material at various intervals all along. 
so few profs can pull off), in the podcasts he and Beth came across as real people, and delightful, fun people at that. Because manuscripts are of particular interest to me, I found the W2 episode most helpful with course material, but later episodes were great fun, featured saga/Viking re-enactors, musicians, craftspeople, and a host of off-the-cuff topics (such as reactions when people hear Beth’s dissertation is on dairy products in Scandinavian literature. Turns out, skyr is pretty interesting, and I wish Iceland luck in promoting it as a substitute for Greek yogurt (if they can produce a fat-free, sugar-free, 80-calorie, 12-grams-of-protein, fruity version for under $1 a serving, I’m in). I discovered the podcasts a bit late, only after Week 2, and they made a huge difference in my perception of the course as a whole. 
I wish there had been a “preview podcast” available from the start in the course material; I think I would have had an easier time with Week 1, a general introduction to Icelandic sagas. I found this week to be the most difficult, probably because I had no background to rely on. I briefly considered giving up at some point, but I really wanted to get to W2, which focused on manuscripts. I had more background here and was able to get a better footing. From there I was hooked, through weeks on the role of landscape in the sagas, how women were portrayed, the depictions of paganism and the Church and the importance of the conflict during conversion, and the supernatural in the sagas. 
The forums were active and well-supported, with questions suggested for each week. I asked a few outside questions (some of them clearly outside the course material). When it worked, it was great: I asked about the “missing rubric” mentioned in a lecture, and Beth went out of her way to bring Robert, the resident manuscript expert, to the boards; I ended up with a lovely example. The course also had a Facebook page, but since I gave up on Facebook way way back when they decided they could manage my feed better than I could (and have no desire to start again, given the disclosures of recent weeks), I missed out on that.
and a half before agreeing to the Christianization of Iceland, then threw his pagan statues into Goðafoss, the waterfall of the gods. I loved learning about things like the Gráskinna, the “ gray skin” manuscript with the sealskin cover that, through subtle changes, makes Hallgerður more sympathetic to the reader; about the contemporary researchers like Jesse Byock, who excavated Mosfell in search of clues about Egils saga, and Emily Lethbridge whose SagaMap plots locations from the different sagas. 
I’ve taken four prior anatomy moocs – Leiden’s course on the abdomen and pelvis, Louvain’s respiration mooc, Penn’s “Out on a Limb” covering all the structures involved in the shoulder and arm, and the encyclopedic Medical Neuroscience course from Duke. This latest suite of courses from Michigan had the advantage of covering everything in four separate but related courses; it had the disadvantage of being less engaging than the other courses. As a result, I watched the videos, then went off on my own to understand the material covered, making sure I had a reliable source, and that the information was the same as given in the course. I found 
It’s one of the Xseries Programs, which means that when you go to the page linked above, you’ll find a price of $179 quoted for the group of four courses. But don’t be scared (at least not yet; the time is a-comin’…). It’s true, you can pay $179 and, assuming you pass the courses, get a Certificate and whatever benefit that affords you, but you can also take the entire thing for free, as I did.
the Leiden course). Anatomical artist Frank Netter has made some extraordinary diagrams that bridge that gap, but those are protected by copyright and thus might be expensive (or impossible) to include in a mooc (the Penn course managed, but that’s Penn). Fortunately, there’s a wealth of material out there, and sometimes a casual hand-drawn diagram – or a video using 3D software to recreate structures – was just what I needed to understand how things worked together.
part of this course, but I reviewed them anyway. I still don’t quite get the hippocampus, since drawings showing the separate layers seem to be completely different from the diagram of the external structure and I don’t understand how they relate, but that’s ok, next time. 
it. Smart and talented people put a lot of work into these things and I’m grateful they’re out there; I need the course structure that even the best Youtube channel doesn’t provide. I did find it a valuable outline for learning. But there must be a better way to teach anatomy – or maybe, providing an outline, and letting students create their own learning (a term I hear over and over again in the context of math classes) is the best approach. As a preparation for further anatomical study, it’s probably as good an option as anything online. And for anatomy geeks, it beats cereal boxes with pictures of organs on them by a mile.
Mongols – and much of it overlaps as groups assimilate, migrate, conquer, or get conquered. But I feel like I’ve made a solid start, and since I created a Cerego set for the course, I’ll be reminded of all of it from time to time and will retain at least the basics of who, what, when, where, why. 
maintained unity. Then we looked at cultural aspects: how people lived, religious details, the Translation Project, and the flourishing of arts and sciences in the Middle East, while keeping in mind the interplay between history and culture. 
from comments of other students, sometimes confirming and often expanding my initial impressions. It’s a handy way to provide an extra challenge in the course, since most moocs have students at every level from absolute novices to accomplished scholars. 
Emily Steiner (@PiersAtPenn) tweeted images from the Book of Kings, which we just covered this week. Combine that with Peter Adamson (@HistPhilosophy, of HoPWaG fame) being in a non-Western philosophy phase at the moment and retweeting a photo of a contemporary statue of Avicenna from Dushanbe, Tajikistan, just yesterday, and I’m really glad I took this course. In fact, I’m ready for more! 
I knew it was a one-play-a-week course, and, at 2-3 hours a week, I figured things would be pretty sparse. While it wasn’t as detailed as the Wellesley courses from last year, which went page-by-page through four plays, it turns out the close focus on two speeches per play served as a very nice platform for covering a wide range of poetic and dramatic devices. I’m also historically somewhat suspicious of phrases like “find your own meaning” as it typically indicates there’s no content, but there was plenty of content here; yet there was ample room for bringing in personal associations and impressions. I participated more in the forums than I have in any course for quite some time, and found that quite rewarding, as there was both staff and student interaction. 
The basic plot of each play was outlined at the beginning of the week; reading or watching each play was not required (or even encouraged beyond the obvious value). Because the focus was on emotion, other faculty was drawn in, including Matt Dry of the Psychology department who explained the physical, cognitive, and behavioral interactions of emotions, and Brid Phillips from the Center of Excellence for the History of Emotions who studies the emotional context in older literature, including Shakepeare. But literary structure was on the menu as well. The course compared various forms of speech in the plays (prose, blank verse, poetry) and how each differed in style as well as detail. 
The material included a variety of forms: lectures, interviews, and readings. Graded assignments were equally diverse: brief quizzes, discussion questions for the Forums, and a final self-graded Assignment inviting a personal interpretation of one of the speeches. I generally dislike what I refer to as forced-posting; counting discussion forum posts as graded items on questions with narrow focus. Here, for some reason, it worked very well for me. I think that’s partly because I found I could respond to the questions posed without even trying; they were questions I wanted to answer (in most cases; I did skip a few). It might also be because the response from staff was very prompt and encouraging, and other students also interacted, all of which made me feel like I’d made a contribution. It helped that I’d studied the first few plays in other courses so was more comfortable with the material, but maybe it was just my mood at the time. In any case, I greatly enjoyed that aspect of the course. 
My favorite week was The Winter’s Tale, a play I haven’t encountered before; the themes of repentance and forgiveness always work for me. I was also greatly surprised at how much I enjoyed the week devoted to Henry V; I’ve always avoided the history plays, but they managed to find a couple of speeches that might turn out to be ways in for me. And it helps that it’s one of the plays featured in a Star Trek: TNG episode. Throughout the course, I should say, I was the “bearer of low culture”, bringing in television, songs, and movies. It’s a role I greatly enjoyed, and no one seemed to mind – but then, in a course where the lead instructor shows off her Shakespeare Rubber Duckie (to quack, or not to quack) and Lady Hamlet Guest Soap (out, damned spot) how could they mind?. 
I highly recommend it for those who haven’t read much Shakespeare or haven’t really found it that enjoyable; the narrow focus on specific scenes and emotions, rather than an onslaught of information about every aspect of the plays, might be the way in for you. And for those who’ve been around the plays a bit more, you might find some interesting tidbits as well; if nothing else, you have a chance to strut your stuff.
This is another of those courses that just popped into my inbox out of the blue a few days before it opened. I was debating whether I wanted to re-start MIT’s 728 series on DNA, so I thought this might help make up my mind (it did: I just don’t want to work as hard as 728 demands, right now). It served as a nice refresher of the basics, from chemistry to cell bio to DNA to immunology, ending with a rational look at vaccines (spoiler alert: scientists are for them). It wasn’t quite as virus-specific as I’d expected, but, first, as an introductory course, some preliminary material was necessary, and second, seating the virology in a network of other concepts makes sense. 
Each week included lecture videos with ungraded “test yourself” questions, and a lab demonstration or interview on a pertinent topic. A summary lecture, complete with concept map (which I greatly appreciated) finished off the week’s material. A live Q&A session, inviting student questions through the forum and participation through a software portal, took place around week 4. Since participation required downloading something, I didn’t attend, and no video has yet been released for us slowpokes so I have no idea how it was, but the question thread was booming so I’m hopeful. 
Graded material included weekly quizzes, a midterm, and a final, with the final heavily weighted. At first I thought of the questions as standard information retrieval, but there are definite shades of meaning in there that require some interpretation and extrapolation. Every once in a while, a congratulatory GIF would pop up when a question was answered correctly; this generally scared the bejesus out of me, showing once again that I really need to calm down. 
brilliant idea, I’m surprised other countries haven’t done this. I’ve enjoyed each of the courses I’ve taken, and found them very helpful to understanding the various fields (which range from design theory to bio to religion to history). Although most of the rest of their 11 courses on the schedule are outside my areas of interest, I’m hopeful I’ll be learning more from them soon. 
I’ve been aware of Kabbalah for decades, both from its mention in popular books and movies to reading a bit more about it in general-readership books on Judaism, like The Jewish Book of Why, but I never knew any of the details, or why some Jews studied it and others didn’t. Then the Beautiful People (aka Madonna) started doing Kabbalah and felt kind of pissed off, that it was being turned into something more like Scientology than something a yeshiva bocher might want to learn when he finished the Talmud. Turns out there are different kinds of Kabbalah, and some have little or nothing to do with Judaism – or religion, or philosophy – at all. 
in the late medieval period, the Renaissance, and in the modern period, as well as contemporary approaches to Kabbalah which move away from contemplation of the nature of the divine into more of a focus on self-help. 
• Design as a way of reinforcing, or challenging, social norms and expectations. This ranged from toys (which can restrict play to what is expected by the designer, and is reflected in the parent’s choice of the toy, or can allow creativity to use the toy in unexpected ways) to water bottles, which we evaluated on various criteria (turns out, I was on board with masculine and feminine, but I seem to have no idea what erotic, expensive, cheap, or comfortable look like). 
• Design not only communicates from designer to user, but from user to society. Eyeglasses have become fashionable, conveying less of “something’s wrong with his eyes” to “wow, she must be smart” or “those glasses are awesome”; why not other assistive devices? Why can’t walkers and wheelchairs come in colors, to make them look like fun gizmos instead of something old people use? Prosthetic leg coverings are available in superhero styles; eye patches can be decorated. 
• Harvard mathematician George David Birkhoff came up with ways to quantify aesthetics, both visual and linguistic. I have a lot of knee-jerk issues with this, but it’s an intriguing idea. For all our protestations that aesthetics is separate from rationality, it might not be quite so cut-and-dried (no, do NOT tell me about the golden mean and the Parthenon, I’ve been successfully inoculated against that by the best mathematicians around). 
In addition to lecture videos, the course used a variety of participatory materials. Each week, a poll question started things off, a sort of priming mechanism that touched upon some aspect of the concepts to be covered. Short quizzes followed lecture sequences. Activities like the water bottle evaluation, and associated discussion questions, also contributed grades. The final week included a quiz that turned out to be a comprehensive final exam; I was a bit taken by surprise since it was embedded in the week 6 material (it was labeled “Final Exam” so I need to pay better attention). It was somewhat more difficult than the shorter weekly quizzes sometimes requiring making fine distinctions between elements of a theory, but once my pulse rate went down I found it to be an excellent summary of the material. 
For me, the course was a great success. I was worried that, because I’m not in the field of design and am hampered by my art-blindness, I wasn’t “getting it”, but the final video, a casual discussion amongst three of the instructors, reassured me: 
the Pacific Rim, through the Bronze and Iron ages to Classical civilizations, across the innovations of Chinese, Indian, and Middle Eastern peoples reaching the European Gothic and Renaissance periods via trade, to the exploitation of New World peoples by Old World commerce, the history of our brilliance, our goodness, our stupidity and cruelty, our human-ness. It’s really quite amazing, how much is packed into these twelve weeks.
I’ll admit, I was a bit confused at first – I never expected lemurs to lead off an architecture course – and I wondered if it had simply been mistitled, and should be Archeology or Anthropology. But that was ok, too, it was interesting whatever it was, and eventually I caught on to the point: our skyscrapers, our political systems, our religious belief and the way we furnish our houses, all that proceeded from that paleolithic cave. Somewhere in the last four weeks, the quote above about cultural dramas and activating surroundings appeared, and I fully realized the value of this approach. I do think an introductory video would be a big help, however.
I’m beginning to understand that the term “architecture” encompasses more than buildings. The arrangement of places for various activities – sleeping, eating, burials, ceremonies – was prevalent in some of the early discussions of First Societies, the earliest examples of people living in groups, today exemplified by the !Kung (or San: yes, like the guy from The Gods Must Be Crazy). Yet many of their customs are still with us: eating together, forming circles, rituals for coming of age and hunting (or, as we’d put it, going to work). Prof. Jarzombek is a specialist in First Societies, so we spent a fair amount of time with the Gravettians and the Magdalenians, noting the differences between the two. 
architectures? Climate changes and environmental upheaval such as earthquakes changed trade routes, motivated invasions and migrations, and offered or shut down trade. It was all fascinating, one long story of people moving around, adapting to new conditions. Yet some major world history events were ignored: The Crusades, for example, are not mentioned. Sometimes the timeline got a little blurred, since there was necessarily some back-and-forth as the focus switched geographical areas (and I assume there’s a “Part 2” course that picks up where we left off, but that hasn’t made it to moocland yet). I felt like I understood the general flow of human history much better by the end of this course, and once I got used to the presentation style (it took a couple of weeks), I had a great time. 
And then of course there were buildings, plenty of buildings. Stonehenge, pyramids, Angkor Wat, the basilica of St. Peter, the Hagia Sofia and Dome of the Rock were all featured, but there was a great deal besides: the coastal villages of the Haida, the Maasai in Kenya and the Hammer in Ethiopia, Maltese cave temples, the roof-accessible houses of the early city at Çatal Hüyük (now Turkey), the city of Cahokia – the Native American metropolis that was larger than the London of its time, and remained the largest city in what is now the US until Philadelphia of the early 19th century – steppes, caves, shores, mountains, forests… well,I could go on, but you get the idea. From the adjoining square houses of Turkey, accessible only from the roof, to the amazing rock-cut temples in India, the beautiful mosques with fantastic arches and domes to Hindu and Buddhist shrines and Greek temples and Christian basilicas and Gothic cathedrals to Versailles, it was just amazing to see what people come up with no matter what their level of technology. 
originally pagan temples became churches, mosques, synagogues as populations changed. Then we looked at issues of restoration and preservation. Interesting questions about authenticity came up. And then there’s the amazing approach of Jorge Otero-Pailos, who, among other things, removes layers of dirt from buildings using a special rubber compound, then 
I’m pretty sure this was a pre-existing OCW recycled as a mooc. Sometimes this repackaging works, sometimes it doesn’t; here, I think it did, although I have to admit the content had far more to do with my enthusiasm than the presentation. The ‘live” in-class lecture approach is a bit less polished than a multiple-take video, but I still prefer it, as read-to-camera so often comes off as stilted and nervous. The professor’s enthusiasm and off-the-cuff commentary more than made up for image quality and occasionally confusing syntax. 
The lectures were basically slide shows accompanied by narratives about a period, or descriptions of the architecture under consideration.The visuals were sometimes hard to see, but most of them are available online elsewhere, with the exception of maps drawn on Google Earth scenes, which were… pretty messy, to be honest, and not intuitive. But I understand his point about maps showing current nation boundaries being useless in this context; his maps did contain useful information about migration patterns and available resources. They’re worth getting used to. 
Each week includes two lectures, both about 90 minutes. They estimate 8 hours a week is required for the course; that sounds reasonable to me, though it took me longer because of the way I do things (and I’m slow). A free online textbook was provided; it’s huge, and I found it difficult to use, but I’m not that comfy with online books; someone more used to Kindles and such might find it much easier. A print version is available; it’s pricey, but if I were a freshman humanities student, I’d invest in it. For that matter, if I could find a used copy for $15, I’d buy it. 
I found Cerego invaluable here; there was just too much stuff to remember it all without constant reinforcement. While it’s time-consuming to enter important points from each lecture into a quiz set, it serves as studying, and it was very much worth it when the exams rolled around. And it’s still nice to see the early material cropping up, reminding me of the rest of the lecture around key points. Makes me smile. 
dislike overdirected commentary, but it does provide structure, so it’s really a matter of preference.