Tuesday, June 9, 2020

Teaching Online


Since 2011, I've been involved in online education in some way or another. First I took the iconic AI class by Peter Norvig and Sebastian Thrun, which started the whole MOOC revolution and a handful of MOOC businesses like edX, started by Anant Agarwal at MIT; Udacity, started by Sebastian Thrun; and Coursera, started by Andrew Ng, a pioneer who taught the Machine Learning class right next to the AI class back in 2011.



Since then, I've taken lots of MOOCs and loved the experience. In 2014, I applied for the first MOOC-based Master's degree from a top university in computer science, Georgia Tech. I'm talking about the Online Master of Science in Computer Science program. I graduated in 2017 and loved every minute of it.


Udemy

Some time in 2015 my brother told me about Udemy and how I could teach whatever I wanted as a hobby. So I decided to try my hand at it, and produced a course titled Beyond Arduino. The main objective of this course is not nice: Convincing the audience that there's more to embedded systems than Arduino!
Udemy was perfect to spread this idea because, well, as a university professor I didn't want to share my bad critiques towards Arduino (objective as they may be), on behalf of a university that teaches Arduino in some programs.

This course eventually turned into a whole ongoing series:



My second course came from the heart! It's the engineering trick that made all of the math and physics suffering go away for me. The trick is problem solving with a Top-Down mindset. This was another course I had to make on my own because it's a critique on the whole educational system: In school we were taught math, physics and the whole STEM bunch backwards! We were taught to imitate the teacher, to follow steps, but rarely how to produce those steps.
So that's what I teach in this course: Learn a Trick to Stop suffering at Math and Physics!

I also wrote a book based on the contents of this course. You can find it on Amazon.

At some point, I decided to also teach the other face of embedded systems: FPGA design. This series has 4 courses so far:

Then I started a series on RISC-V embedded applications. Here are the installments so far:

Lynda and LinkedIn Learning

I always wanted to teach at Lynda.com because of its prestige, so a couple of times I applied to be considered as an instructor, but for some reason I never got a reply. Then, in 2016, right before getting my MSc degree, I decided to pull the Georgia Tech card, and boom! I got my reply. Since then I've enjoyed producing courses with an elite group of talented professionals in all steps of the educational material development process. By then Lynda.com had started transitioning into LinkedIn Learning. Here are my profiles with the courses I've created with them so far:



GalileoX, at edX

Along the way, I've produced some courses for my employer, Universidad Galileo and edX. It turns out that sometime around 2016, Galileo University decided to join the select group of universities that teach online at edX.

Here's my teacher profile with my GalileoX courses.


Galileo University

Of course, this journey has given me a number of priceless abilities that have been useful in my 9 to 5 job as an educator. Well, the same can be said the other way around: The reason I was able to pull this off is the 15 years of training I had by teaching at Galileo since 2004.
Having created a Master's program at Galileo, I got very motivated to turn that program into a fully-online Master's program, and that's what I've been doing over the last 2 years: Producing high quality online courses for my own program, with the help of our talented faculty.