World of MOOC

According to Wikipedia, Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) is an online course aimed at unlimited participation and open access via the web. These courses becomes very popular recently.

I took my first online course at the end of 2011 at Coursera. It was "Introduction to Databases" by Stanford University (this course will be back soon). I was afraid my knowledge of English will be insufficient for the course. But all was fine - I enjoyed the course and it help me with my university course on databases. Few other courses at Coursera was fun too. What makes Coursera unique is a quantity of courses, hundreds of it.

Then I loved Udacity. Their courses are very practical and exciting. I have completed 8 of them and partially watched almost all other courses. What I especially like is that all of these courses are self-paced: you can watch and complete them any time you want. But then Udacity enabled paid certificates and add a few courses developed with some corporations. Last one (on Hadoop) I finished only yesterday. Yep, it is still fun and I don't even bother about certificates, knowledge is more important. But I don't recognize Udacity: course was too short and cursory. I hope upcoming courses will be more interesting.

The last one platform I have used is Edx. Now I think this will become my favorite. It has a few courses compare to Coursera. But I like this platform. It is open-sourced and beautiful. Courses seems pervasive for me. I haven't finish one yet, but I watched few of them. I hope this platform becomes more popular and get more interesting courses.

For any interested in online learning I can recommend really cool MOOC tracker class-central. It seems to be the largest and the simplest one tool for planning your learning. Good luck!

I would happy to see your opinions, remarks and experience on MOOC in comments. Comments on English will be appreciated too.

Hexadecimal calendar

I have made simple and cute hexadecimal calendar on tikz library:

Original code was pretty simple and I decided not to change it too much. So I make some ugly hack with pgfcalendar and add another number representation to it. Idea of hexadecimal calendar was stolen from this post (Russian).

Modified file from pgfcalendar, source code and compiled calendar in PDF available on my github repo hexadecimal-calendar.