I’ve been remiss in updating due to being busy on the Coursera site. I’m currently taking the Programming Languages course from Dan Grossman of the University of Washington. It has a strong focus on functional programming, a paradigm that is completely new to me. It’s pretty amazing to learn about these powerful programming idioms that don’t yet exist in mainstream languages.

Meanwhile I am also serving as a Community TA for the current run of Princeton’s Algorithms 1 course. Apparently I got the invitation due to good grades and being active in the forums during the first run of the course. It basically means playing the role of moderator on the official forums and helping students with explanations and basic problem solving when appropriate. It’s sometimes disheartening to note how many students don’t understand basic instructions, for example, like zipping two files is not the same as putting the two files in a folder and zipping that folder. But it’s also great to see students work on the same problems that I spent time on last year, sometimes with results that surprise me.

For those curious, we get moderator powers and can view some personal details of students. We also gain access to a TA-only forum in which instructors and TAs from all of the courses on the platform can interact. We also regularly interact with the course instructor by e-mail. But we have no special behind-the-scenes access to the nuts-and-bolts of the system. So fixing stuff like broken autograders, server outages and the like are done only by Coursera engineers.

Finally if you’re not yet into the MOOC scene, here’s a recent post on the official Coursera blog announcing a huge expansion plan. Those in Asia may be interested in knowing some of the new universities that have signed up include the National Taiwan University and the National University of Singapore. Courses in more languages than just English should be available soon, including some in Chinese. In fact I should be taking a couple of courses on C++ later this year in French simply because they are the only C++ courses on the platform currently available and it is kind of embarrassing not to know the standard language most widely in use in industry.