What is Coursera?

Do you know Coursera? If you don't, you have to.

What is it?
Coursera is a website where you will find free online courses about the subject you probably have been dreaming about and with the support of some of the best universities in the world: USA, Canada, UK or Switzerland, among others.

How does it work?
Once you create an account, free account, you can start searching your course: they're offering right now 204 different courses with many different topics. You can search by category or by University or by your own words.

They give you the basic information about each course: a small text with the course's description, a few questions, answered by the responsible of the course, and a short video as well. All the courses have a beginning date and a duration in weeks.

Did you find your course? Sign up! For a few weeks, you will see short video lectures on different topics and you will also have assignments to be submitted. You will do quizzes related to the videos, that will give you a score. Your assignments will give you another score and they will be checked by your peers, or sometimes by the course's staff, it depends on the course, they will tell you the conditions in each case. With both scores, you will get the final score. Some of the courses will give you a certificate if you reach a minimum percentage, such as 80% or 70%.

You will find more general information about the Website and even about their pedagogy here: http://www.coursera.org/about 

My personal experience.
I've done two courses, and I will tell you, I'm in love with Coursera.

First, I've done Gamification, by the University of Pennsylvania. The teacher was Kevin Werbach. We learnt about this new concept, which is growing up very fast nowadays. I'll tell you more about in another post, but giving you a resume: "Gamification is the application of game elements and digital game design techniques to non-game problems", it's a huge and very interesting world.
 
Back in the course, it lasted about 6 weeks. The teacher was very nice and made the lessons easy to see and listen. Finally, you needed at least 80% of the score to get the certificate and... I got it! 91,1% of happiness :)

Now, I'm finishing Human Computer Interaction, by Standford University. It lasts 9 weeks and the main teacher is Scott Klemmer, although it also have teachers assistants. In this case, Spanish speakers, (just like me :D) have the oportunity of doing their assignments in Spanish.

At the moment, I'm doing the last assignment, which is ending tonight, and then, after checking my peers' work, I'll wait to know if I'll finally get the certificate, crossing fingers!. I'll tell you more about the course in another post.