Some more MOOCs to keep you busy on winter nights
John Murrell
Another MOOC has come to my attention that is due to start on 14th September 2015 this is titled ‘Analysing the Universe’ and runs for 6 weeks. The course seems to do much as the title says see the course home page at https://www.coursera.org/course/analyze for details. As with all these courses they are free though you will need to pay if you want a certificate.
Even if you don’t want to follow the complete course there are 4 useful lectures on the use of the Virtual Observatory analysis software DS9 . You should be able to get to these using the ‘Preview Lectures’ button on the page above. This leads to https://class.coursera.org/analyze-003/lecture The relevant lectures are Week 1 Lecture 5 & 6 and Week 2 Lecture 1 & 2. They provide a good introduction to DS9 but this will be developed as the class continues. Of course you can use DS9 to analyse your own images if you have them in FITs format and have them calibrated. Sites like Astrometry.net will do that for you and convert your image file to FITS format though if you start with a JPG you will have lost some (or most ?) intensity information.
In addition the Australian National University have recently released 3 of the 4 MOOCs that cover their first year undergraduate course as self paced MOOCs so you can start them at any time and continue at your own pace. I am not sure how the support works during the self paced courses but if you get no help on the course pages try posting your question here and someone may be able to help.
Details of the courses at https://www.mooc-list.com/university-entity/australian-national-university-anu?static=true this shows 2 as self paced but the lecturers said one of the others was due to be released as a self paced course as well.
I was thinking of creating a list of these courses but the provision is so dynamic that it is difficult to keep up. The aggregator MOOC List is supposed to show all MOOCs but it is difficult to filter out the interesting ones amongst all the others.
If you sign up for these courses let us all know how you got on. Your tips may help others.
My tip is that you need to have the courage to take part in the discussion forums – a lot of people apparently get stuck and do not ask for help through the forums. In some MOOCs not so much the astronomy ones the forums seem to take on a life of their own expanding on the subject of the MOOC.
Enjoy
John Murrell