To distract my mind from things, learning new information and skills have always been my way of being occupied. It was much easier as a kid because I didn't have to worry about bills and anything. I could take any courses I want from Mathematics, Business to Foreign languages. However, since I am now twenty year old something, I need to be more strategic about the course I am taking. My criteria of taking course now, is a course that not only I will learn something from but has a practical value for my resume.
It's also interesting how MOOC has come this far. When I was in junior high school, I was only exposed to small numbers of MOOC platform. Not to mention, the course was limited and the UI was terrible. These days, there are improvements in the UI and UX across these MOOC sites. The courses are also much more diverse and interesting. Personally, some of my most favorites would be would be AI, ML, and IoT.
I stopped taking online courses when I got into university. Basically, my interest to study and gaining new information were lowering. I was only focusing on something that I knew quite well, the philosophy and religious studies despite being agnostic . So, because I was in literature major, I also found it hard to make friends with someone who is interested in Technology. I felt like out of place until when I started getting into crypto and internet entrepreneurship. Only then, I tried to find my way bridging my interest to technology. I found many fascinating information and practical application of Linguistic. At that point my interest of learning was revived. I started learning how to design a software and managed to build a first prototype of my book tracking app. But life got into the way.
That time, I was already in blockchain space and I also want to explore this shiny stuff. My first impression after reading Bitcoin whitepaper was that, it was an improved ways to perform transaction between each other. However, I got curious as to " why do people call it revolutionary?", " how does it work technically?", " Can anybody mine bitcoin?", " what is a bitcoin node?" and so many other questions. But I was overly confident that I knew stuff just by reading things and experiencing first hand participating in blockchain. So, I never got to really learn it from a proper course.
Early of this year, I saw a tweet from Andreas Antonopoulos. In that tweet he mentioned about Introduction to Digital Currencies by Nicosia University. I was enrolled in the Spring semester but because my university life got more demanding, I couldn't quite catch up with everything there. As of today, I am enrolled in the Fall semester. Sure you can find most of the content on youtube but during the livestream, the questions are different and it's something new.
This Introduction to Digital Currencies is 12 weeks long program. The course provide materials and youtube videos including the test each week. Now I am in week 9 which is talking about Regulatory and tax treatment.
Another course that I am currently enrolled is provided by EdX, a nonprofit organization MOOC by MIT and Harvard. I am currently taking two on-going courses by The Linux Foundation. The courses that I am taking are : Introduction to Linux and Kubernetes.
Some of these chapters are already familiar to me since I use Linux. But I want to know more about Bash shell and scripting which will be taught at chapter 15 & 16.
I got interested in Kubernetes because a friend has talked to me about it. I keep hearing about it so I got curious on how Kubernetes works. This is some of the chapters that they are teaching there.
Time investment wise, I spend about 7 hours of my time learning in these courses. I normally do it at night after I finish with my actual study and other things. There's also an hour investment every Thursday for my MOOC in digital currency. Thus far, I enjoy learning from these courses and hoping to transfer my knowledge into a contribution or tangible product.
