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Originally Posted by lazjen
I did this course a couple of years ago and it was good. You need reasonable math skills to succeed. I think the course quotes 6 hrs/week and you'll probably need at least that.
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I think this was one of the most challenging, but most fulfilling online courses I've ever did! it's very involved but you'll learn a lot. Highly, highly recommended.
You'll only need high school algebra but it will take awhile to get back into that gear for some people (like me).
However... I just got this email today from Intro to Astro on Coursera:
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Dear IntroAstro alumni,
If you are reading this you were part of one of the three sessions of IntroAstro on Coursera. I want to thank you again for taking part in this exciting experiment in learning. I'm writing you today to provide an important update and to ask you to help me out.
The update is that I have sadly decided not to offer the class through Coursera again. As you may know, Coursera is moving to a new platform and a new on-demand format for courses. I can see many advantages of this new format but in my opinion it is ill-suited for our particular class. I feel strongly that in IntroAstro having a cohort of students working through the material in concert, all concentrating on one week of material and assignments at a time, fostered the kind of interactions on the forums that were one of the main strengths of the course. It also allowed a level of interaction between students and course staff that I fear would not be possible in the new format. I may be wrong here, but it was my decision to take.
I am very grateful to Coursera and to all of you for having made these three sessions possible, it was a wonderful experience for me and one I could not have imagined ten years ago. We live in exciting times. As the rapidly-changing field of online education develops I will continue to follow with interest, and if I feel I have an opportunity to make a contribution I may well be tempted to try again, because IntroAstro with you was so much fun!
As part of the transition to the new platform, the old one is being shut down. At the end of each session, we promised to keep the course site open as long as we could. This period is now at an end. Your ability to actively interact with the sites will terminate at the end of March, 2016. The site will be completely shut down later, probably sometime in June, 2016. As I promised, I am writing to give you a chance to download any materials you wish to keep.
You also have one last quick chance to exchange final messages on the forums with people you met in the course with whom you'd like to stay in touch, etc. If you have opinions on the format change (many of you doubtless know more about it than I do) I'd be interested to read them there as well. If you want to contact me after the class is over you can use the email address introastro2012@gmail.com .
Before the site shuts down, I also want to ask you to help me out. One of the exciting aspects of these new teaching tools is that they can be used to learn about how students learn and how we can better teach. The site maintains records of student activity at a level of detail that has never before been possible. The possibilities are intriguing and professionals in education research are working to learn how to use the wealth of newly available data. With a former student here, I am pursuing an initial attempt at this. We will be using data from the course, naturally stripped of identifying information. You can help us out by filling out a short survey you can access at https://class.coursera.org/introastr...rt?quiz_id=673. Your participation is of course completely voluntary, if you can take the time to do this I'll be grateful.
Thanks for everything,
ronen
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