Coursera, Udacity, MIT Open Courseware, and other such sites are useful to me because they decouple the desire to learn college-level material from the expense and regulations of earning (another) diploma. The latter isn't compelling to me today, but the former certainly is. I've now taken three Coursera courses: Functional Programming Principles in Scala, Social Network Analysis, and Coding the Matrix: Linear Algebra Through Computer Science Applications. I also tried to take Calculus: Singl...

I recently completed the Coursera Social Network Analysis class. This was my first time taking a Coursera class. In this post, I will describe my experience with Coursera generally, and review the Social Network Analysis class in particular. Along with several of my colleagues, I took Martin Odersky's Functional Programming Principles in Scala class at the same time. Although I finished my last assignment for that class weeks ago, the class isn't technically complete, so I will reserve commen...