Electronic Resource Review: Coursera, Part II, www.Coursera.Org

Abstract

In my first review of Coursera, in this journal’s November 2018 issue (vol. 21 no. 4), I focused on the general potential of Coursera to benefit music librarians and their patrons as a professional development tool. In this second review, I will focus on how Coursera has benefitted me personally, and how several of the courses I completed positively affected both my personal and professional life. The course I consider the most valuable tome personally, is a course that may not seem particularly tied to my work as a music archivist/librarian, Learning How to Learn: Powerful Mental Tools to Help You Master Tough Subjects, teamtaught by Dr. Barbara Oakley and Dr. Terrance Sejnowski. Sejnowski is the director of the Computational Neurobiology Laboratory at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies andOakley is an engineering professor at OaklandUniversity, with a research focus on education and learning. I was not surprised to find that Learning How to Learn is listed as 2018’s second most popular offering on Coursera (with an enrollment of over 1.7 million), topped only by Machine Learning, taught by Coursera co-founder Andrew Ng (https://www.coursera. org/collections/popular-courses-2018). The style of their videos is not particularly slick in terms of performance or visual presentation (in contrast to another course that I’ve started, Creative Writing: the Craft of Plot, which is far more polished in this regard), but it is still very engaging. Actually, I found the fact of it being taught by this duo of gentle nerds to be part of its charm. The course is set up to take four weeks to complete, and I finished it in three days. I couldn’t stop watching and thinking about how I could deploy what I was learning to all parts of my life. They tell you how and why they design their videos the way they do, and how they apply neurological research in the making of instructional videos in their follow up course Mindshift: Break Through Obstacles to Learning and Discover Your Hidden Potential. In both courses, Oakley presents more on strategies and how-to’s while Sejinowski goes in depth on the neurological and biological reasoning for the concepts presented by Oakley. Topics covered in their first course include focused and diffuse modes of thinking, procrastination, practice, and working and long-term memory as well as