I had a bit of a lull while waiting for the second part of an algorithms course to begin on Coursera and so while browsing the site, noticed this “study at your pace” format course. Since both my wife and myself are crazy about dogs, I thought that it might be a good course for the two of us to go through together and likely has insignificant homework. It’s run by Brian Hare of Duke University.

Now, as a skeptic, I’m leery of dog trainers’ more outlandish claims. Cesar Millan, the infamous dog whisperer, was in Malaysia recently and I was basically rolling my eyes whenever I heard him talk on the radio. As such, I expected this course to offer some interesting and perhaps occasionally useful tips on handling dogs, but I was also prepared to put up with a fair bit of quackery and dubious claims in it. It turns out that I was completely wrong as this course is not about training dogs at all and in fact professor Hare admits that he has no special insight about how to get dogs to behave in the way that you want.

What this course really covers is what is it that makes the minds of dogs so special compared to just about every other animal and how did their minds come to be this way. To facilitate this, the lecture videos also compare dogs with other animals like chimpanzees, bonobos, foxes and even humans. It talks about the history behind various theories of mind in animals and covers many, many experiments that are designed to tease out how an animal’s mind works based on its observed behavior. It’s a much more scientifically rigorous and a far more fascinating course than I’d expected.

The key point that the professor wants to convey is that dogs, pretty much uniquely among all animals, are capable of understanding humans and cooperating with them intuitively and naturally without any training required at all. In fact, dogs actually seem at their happiest and most effective when they are working together with humans. When set to solve problems, dogs by themselves perform poorly, but when partnered with humans, they ace the problems.

To answer the question of how dogs came to be this way, the course covers research by Russian geneticist Dmitry Konstantinovich Belyaev who ran a breeding program for wild silver foxes in the 1950s and goes on today. By selectively breeding foxes that showed interest in humans and lacked aggression, Belyaev was able to create a population of foxes that are domesticated. Perhaps even more shockingly, these domesticated foxes also showed morphological changes that are consistent with other domesticated species even though these traits were not selected for!

Accompanying this course is the website Dognition which is apparently a project by professor Hare and his colleagues to do what he calls citizen science. Essentially users can sign up and get access to various games to play with their own dogs, upload the results and then compile a cognitive profile of the dogs involved in this manner. Obviously this allows the researchers to gather a far larger pool of data than would be normally possible. You need to pay money to sign up however, so I didn’t do it, but I can see how it can be interesting and certainly the payment is necessary if only to discourage fake accounts with bogus results.

The only complaints I have are about its presentation. The actual videos that are shot are really good and professor Hare speaks in a very conversational style that is highly appealing. Unfortunately, the resolution of the videos that are uploaded to Coursera is very low, so much so that it is quite difficult to read text on some of his slides. I’m also disappointed that this course is available only in the “study at your pace” format instead of the normal, session-by-session format. This format not only is worse in terms of user interface, though this is a Coursera thing, but it also basically kills any possibility of meaningful inter-student interaction on the forums. I was looking forward to reading all kinds of interesting anecdotes about dogs in the forums, but as usual without organized sessions, there are too few students to sustain any discussion. I really hope this course could be offered in the more normal format in the future together with TAs to help answer questions and direct discussions.

Apart from this, I can happily say that this is a great course whose quality and scientific rigor exceeded my expectations by a large margin. If you own and love dogs yourself, you pretty much have to go through all of the lectures. If not, it’s still a fascinating course for those who are curious about how the minds of animals work.