It stands for Massive Open Online Courses, something I only found out about a few weeks about, through my lovely friend Lilia of Horror Shock Lolipop.
She linked me to a couple of places that offer these courses for free: coursera and iversity.
I found lots of interesting courses, but have limited myself to just one for the time being. I picked Design 101 with iversity, which started last week.
Every day, those enrolled receive a video postcard and a letter, set in various parts of the world. On Monday, we are given an idea of what we will do during the week, so we have time to prepare, and there is a quiz (so far, I don't like the quizzes, but that's the only thing I don't like!)
From Tuesday to Friday there is a 'homework' task set, which we should spend no more than 1 hour on.
Saturday is a day for updating our personal notebooks and catching up on homework, whilst on Sunday we get an extra little video to watch.
So far, the homework hasn't been too taxing :)
Homework has involved origami, mask-making, cooking, portraits and paper-cutting!
I particularly had fun with the mask-making one (yes, I made both in an hour! Modelling here with Mum's friend who is awesome and refreshingly silly).
The emails, 'postcards' and letters we receive are fun and interesting. The postcards make use of a lot of cool animation and all reference different aspects of design, music, and things I wouldn't necessarily expect to find in connection to design. There are also some great quotes included along the way.
I decided to enrol for Design 101 (or #design1o1 as it's tagged on all the social media) because design and creativity is something that interests me!
I did a module on design at university, as part of my Computer Studies degree, but struggled with it, along with the majority of my class (a rant best left for another day. Needless to say we passed by the skin of our teeth).
I'm hoping that I'll get more out of this course than the module I did at uni! It's much more hands-on, introduced in bite-sized, interesting chunks, and is visually appealing. The only appealing thing I got from my uni course was the world 'weltanschauung'!
This is distracting me a little from NaNoWriMo, but it's good for my brain to work on something other than writing during November!
This looks awesome & I am really happy you found something that really makes you happy, too :).
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