LITTLE ROCK — Wow! This is the way to go!
Coursera.org offers more than 100 free courses from universities such as Cal Tech, University of California at Berkeley, Rice, John Hopkins, University of Illinois and 11 others. The number of students is approaching a million. Bill Gates’ favorite online learning site, Khan Academy, has hundreds more college courses, many on technical subjects, and they, too, are all free.
Is this a trend? Is it the future? We certainly hope so. Considering the cost of attending a major university these days, there has to be an alternative. Sending a student to four years at one of the biggies such as Princeton, Harvard, University of Chicago, etc., costs around a quarter of a million dollars.Have two kids? That’s half a million. Second-tier schools cost only slightly less.
UC-Berkeley has an online course called “Software Engineering for SaaS.” (That’s “software as a service.”) In short, courses can be incredibly specific and career-oriented. However, Coursera also has general courses, like Princeton’s History of the World since 1300. (That would be the beginning of the Renaissance.) Students watch video lectures and earn certificates signed by the professor. They also grade one another, after they have proven they can grade competently. (Enough with underpaid teaching assistants; everybody can be a teaching assistant.)
Joy signed up for a University of Pennsylvania class on health-care policy and it was almost like being there. The video showed the class from the perspective of a student facing the teacher. When the professor told the class to get out their clickers and guess how many people in America are uninsured, Joy was one of the few who got it right, clicking on an onscreen multiple-choice slide instead of an actual physical device like the clickers handed out in class. (The U.S. has 15 percent uninsured. Most people think it’s much higher.)
Coursera and Khan Academy aren’t the only players stepping forward. Carnegie Mellon University offers free Open Learning Initiative courses in the sciences, statistics, speech and languages. Find them at oli.cmu.edu. Carnegie Mellon, by the way, is one of the leading schools for cybernetics and robotics. Duke University offers A Beginner’s Guide to Irrational Behavior. We feel sure we’ve met those students.
Alison.com offers free courses from publishers such as Adobe, Sun Microsystems, Stanford, MIT, Microsoft, Amazon and others. “TED Talks” at Ted.com are short lectures on a huge range of topics. Among a recent week’s “most e-mailed” was Crimes of the Future, which is actually about the degree to which modern criminal gangs have adopted technology to create their own instant networks.
Of course, when you learn online you miss the fun of being part of a college peer group. But maybe you can have both. These online courses are a wonderful way to sample the caliber of a school’s teachers and classes and pursue a degree later.
NEW WINDOWS OFFICE
Previewing the new Microsoft Office 2013 is a blast. It’s totally unlike our experience trying to preview Windows 8, which crashed our test computer every few minutes.
Office 2013 Preview is a free download from Microsoft.com/Office/Preview. The preview leaves your existing copy of Office in place, so there’s no risk of overwriting it. Unfortunately, 55 percent of Windows users won’t be able to try it, since it doesn’t run on the still widely used XP or Vista operating systems.
But here’s our take for the Windows 7 users: While the Office 2013 preview is installing on your machine or tablet, you can experiment with a PowerPoint presentation that comes up automatically to tell you about the new features.You can insert a video from YouTube or play around with the new clip-art tools. There are now three sources of online clip art, counting your own stored pics. We brought in a flower and clicked “color” to change the petals from purple to blue. Unfortunately, it also painted the leaves blue.
When you hit “save,” you’re prompted to save your document, spreadsheet or presentation to the online storage area they call “Sky-Drive.” No matter what computer or tablet you’re using, it will be there when you need it. (At least that’s what it says in the promotion.) There’s also a “share” button for collaborating online.
We tried out a greeting card template in Word 2013 but had to remove the word “Thank You” from one side of the card or it would have printed upside down on the back. The online templates were much better, and included cards, brochures, reports, fliers and the like. The only thing that bugged us was how the “ribbon,” a familiar feature to Windows 2007 users, disappeared when we didn’t mean to make it go, and it didn’t immediately return when we clicked. A couple times, the program just froze.
We were impressed with the new Excel. Highlight a few columns, choose “quick analysis” and have the data converted to one of several suggested charts, with quick previews of how they will look.
Office 2013 Preview is a free trial. It expires 60 days after the official launch in late October. You’ll still be able to use it to read and print documents but it won’t have full functionality.
TRENDS
New research shows 98 percent mistrust the information they find online, according to a Harris study of 1,900 Americans.
Jobs for those who can create Apple device apps rose 30 percent, compared with 20 percent for Android apps, according to Freelancer.com’s survey of 189,000 jobs posted in the past three months.
More than half of cellphone users watch TV while they’re playing with their phones, according to a new Pew Internet and American Life survey. The majority use their cell phones during commercials.
One in five hacked logins match Microsoft Accounts. Microsoft Accounts is a tool that lets you sign in to Xbox, Skydrive, Messenger, Hotmail and other accounts with the same user name and password. In short, it may not be a good idea to use the same password for lots of different apps.
Ordinary cell phones may be on the way out. Nielsen’s June survey found that two out of three people who bought phones chose smart phones.
NOTE: Readers can search several years’ worth of On Computers columns at oncomp.com. Bob and Joy can be contacted by email at bobschwab@gmail.com and joydee@oncomp.com
Business, Pages 20 on 07/30/2012