Free education.
A little phrase that could change the world. I signed up for a course at coursera.org, which offers free courses from universities around the world. Today is the starting date for the course I'm taking, Securing Digital Democracy, which addresses the security of voting systems.
How did it go? In a nutshell: Easy navigation, clear instructions, opportunities for interaction.
You have to agree to an honor code, including the ethics policy for that particular course. For this course, there are video lectures - apparently with questions -- I received a popup for my answer as to how I would 'cheat' (in section about thinking like an attacker). Answering seemed to be voluntary; there was a cancel button.
Every week there will be a quiz, and at the end will be a peer-graded final essay. Thankfully, there are discussion forums in which the students can chat and help one another. There are extra activities, which are on your own time. There is a recommended textbook - recommended, not mandatory.
Interestingly, I see a course Wiki. Coursera evidently is spawning Meetups - physical gatherings of Courserians.
So far, so good! The website is very well designed. The only hiccup I experienced today was that my browser Chrome refused to play the video. I switched to Firefox, which played it flawlessly. A peek at the source code for the page showed two videos: one in mp4 format and the other in webm. Firefox played the webm format. I have no idea why Chrome didn't. (possibly because I use a build of Chromium?)
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8 -October
The video problem was rapidly fixed, although you never had to rely on browser play. The videos were downloadable.
A little phrase that could change the world. I signed up for a course at coursera.org, which offers free courses from universities around the world. Today is the starting date for the course I'm taking, Securing Digital Democracy, which addresses the security of voting systems.
How did it go? In a nutshell: Easy navigation, clear instructions, opportunities for interaction.
You have to agree to an honor code, including the ethics policy for that particular course. For this course, there are video lectures - apparently with questions -- I received a popup for my answer as to how I would 'cheat' (in section about thinking like an attacker). Answering seemed to be voluntary; there was a cancel button.
Every week there will be a quiz, and at the end will be a peer-graded final essay. Thankfully, there are discussion forums in which the students can chat and help one another. There are extra activities, which are on your own time. There is a recommended textbook - recommended, not mandatory.
Interestingly, I see a course Wiki. Coursera evidently is spawning Meetups - physical gatherings of Courserians.
So far, so good! The website is very well designed. The only hiccup I experienced today was that my browser Chrome refused to play the video. I switched to Firefox, which played it flawlessly. A peek at the source code for the page showed two videos: one in mp4 format and the other in webm. Firefox played the webm format. I have no idea why Chrome didn't. (possibly because I use a build of Chromium?)
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8 -October
The video problem was rapidly fixed, although you never had to rely on browser play. The videos were downloadable.
Well www.coursera.org/course/digitaldemocracy Securing Digital Democracy is over with _no_ final essay. Believe it or not, we students are disappointed that we didn't have to write a final essay. And bewildered. The time simply ran out with no word from the prof or assistant.
As for what we learned -- the best voting system is optical scan voting machines, combined with paper ballots. Put a period there and don't argue.
Today's electronic voting machines are easily tampered with, use closed source software with little to no independent scrutiny or testing and are usually _not_ used in conjunction with an auditable paper trail.
People voting with those machines are asked to put blind faith in a few software developers and a secretive company.
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And yet another update: the prof did post 2 short essays for us. They will be peer-graded. So we are busily doing that. It's quite a while after the final date for the course, but...we'll wrap up the 26th.
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And yet another update: the prof did post 2 short essays for us. They will be peer-graded. So we are busily doing that. It's quite a while after the final date for the course, but...we'll wrap up the 26th.
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