Life long learning

One of the wonderful things that the internet enables is online education. Love the idea and think it is going to revolutionize education around the world. You no longer need to walk into a building, you can learn from the comfort of your own home at your own pace. And free courses can reach millions who would otherwise not be able to afford an education.

So, as part of my life long learning project, I've signed up for a free course at Coursera. I learn new things all the time, but realize that there are areas that have huge gaps - astronomy being one. Yes, I could do what I always do and check out books and videos from my library and read up on the topic myself, but I've decided to try a structured learning of the material. The class I signed up for, Introduction to Astronomy, starts Nov 27 and run for 9 weeks. It is taught by a professor at DuKe University, and the course description says:

"In this class, we will be studying, quite literally, everything in the universe.  We will start with "classical" astronomy, describing the night sky and organizing what we see as was done in ancient times.  We will then embark on a journey, starting here on Earth and progressing outward, to study the Solar system, the Milky Way galaxy, and the wonderful and strange objects we observe in deep space, such as black holes, quasars, and supernovae.  We will end with some discussion of what scientists know today about the universe as a whole.  Along the way we will introduce some of the methods, theoretical and experimental, that have been used to understand all of this, from Newton's laws, through our understanding of light and matter, to Einstein's theory of relativity, and from Galileo's telescope to WMAP."

Sounds fascinating no? This will be my first experience with Coursera, though have already signed up for another class that starts up in Feburary. More on that later.

Have you jumped on the online education train? What courses are you taking?