“I am now in three dimensions!” - My short (and not very succsessful) trip into Algebra

I do have as much practical experiences with MOOCs as I have with the breeding of scallops – close to none. Being forced (but yet generally interested) to attend one made me think that this might be the moment to, in a safe environment, face my perhaps biggest fear – mathematical equations. After kindly asking YouTube to suggest to me some videos about “Algebra MOOC”, I ended up in the “MIT 18.06 LinearAlgebra” course, that was uploaded by the Massachusetts Institue of Technology (MIT) eight years ago, with the MIT being one of the first institutions to adopt the idea of MOOCs on a large scale. Of their videos, that together accumulated over 100 Mio. views, it is the second most watched.

What my teacher, Mr. Strang, looked like.

The professor in that somewhat grainy video whom I challenged to teach me something that I actively refused to learn for many years in school was a really nice, maybe about 60 year old guy named Gilbert Strang. Right when he started talking, you would know that he was not really the most outgoing, dynamic, gushing and enthusiastic person ever, but that he loved what he was doing. I quickly thought that, apart from “quality knowledge” that is being passed on, it is the “perfect” teacher who would make the “perfect” MOOC just that. This goes also well with J. Daniel, who in is 2012 paper stated that the “real revolution” of MOOCs might be to remind institutions of their obligation to focus on quality teaching, rather than on other efforts like research. And even though he only blinked with his left eye, Mr. Strang did a very decent job.

However, and awkwardly, after a few seconds a quite crucial thing striked me. Namely, that asking the teacher something was fairly difficult – nobody exept myself heard my querying "uhmmm, wait... what!?" Admittedly, I could have played the same moment just another x=12 times until I finally (maybe) would have understood him. So asking the teacher was in a way easier than in school/university, because even repeating the same thing 371 times would not annoy him, but on the other hand it was more difficult, because I would have been annoyed at some point, when he would use the exact same words over and over again. But to be honest, I guess somebody who would have really wanted to learn something about algebra and not about MOOCs would have understood after a few repeats why this wrinkly man in his loose-fitting pants was so enthusiastic about drawing exactly this points and this line in his coordinate systems. As for my personal adventure time with algebra, I think it was when he casually informed me about him now being "in three dimensions" that I finally shut down and began to write this.

What I thought I would do - but did not.

But despite everything, I genuinely enjoyed it, even though it is late in the evening and I could definitely think of some other things to watch right now. Except from an unpromisingly attempt to understand how programming works, I have never before attended any form of MOOC, which is actually a pity because I believe that MOOCs do have the potential to really make people learn something when they do bring along a certain amount of self-motivation. Plus, after all, it was a nice reminder that my mathematical skills (x) probably equal that of a goat (g), and that studying something like STS, where I can be sitting here and joking but not crying about exactly that might have been one of my smarter ideas.