New hands on beginning electronics MOOC (online and free!) course.

[mtdoc]

edX has a course starting soon that looks ideal for beginners:

Electronic Interfaces: Bridging the Physical and Digital Worlds

It looks to have a bit of everything:  Basic theory, breadboarding simple circuits, some embedded programming and building a simple robot. 

Best of all it looks like lots of hands on!

[Simon]

And would you care to qualify what you mean by a beginner, I take it you mean a beginner in that particular area of electronics. It's certainly not a subject that should be taken on without basic electronic understanding.

Too many courses jump straight to microcontrollers and programming before they have taught Ohm's law and then we wonder why we get certain questions on the forum.

[mtdoc]

And would you care to qualify what you mean by a beginner,

Well it's not my course - but there is plenty of info about it on the edX website. For example:

Prerequisites
High school level algebra and physics are recommended, but not required. Some exposure to computer programming would be useful for those who want to improve upon the robot design. The most important requirement is a willingness and desire build things with your hands!

The syllabus is HERE

Worst case is someone signs up for free and finds out later it is not suitable for them.

[LukeW]

Sounds like yet another person today (or university in this case) who thinks that "beginning electronics" equals microcontrollers, Arduino etc.

Not that that's completely devoid of value, but if you want a MOOC that will give you a reasonably good coverage of "real electronics" theory at a university first-year level, MIT 6002x is one that's available. https://www.edx.org/course/circuits-electronics-mitx-6-002x#.VJ6aujCAMs

[mtdoc]

Not that that's completely devoid of value, but if you want a MOOC that will give you a reasonably good coverage of "real electronics" theory at a university first-year level, MIT 6002x is one that's available. https://www.edx.org/course/circuits-electronics-mitx-6-002x#.VJ6aujCAMs

I agree that the MIT 6002x course is a great course. It was the first MOOC I became familiar with - watched most of the lectures on Apples iTunes U and on YouTube before it became an edX course. Anant Agarwal is a great lecturer and is one of the founders of the whole MOOC movement.

BUT - it's apples to oranges: 

I think 6002x or similar is the type of course anyone who is serious about EE needs to take early on. It requires college level physics and calculus to really grasp a lot of what he teaches ( he starts with Maxwel's equations!).  It has no hands on. It is all theory. I would guess that most of the MIT students who take it already have a basic hobbyist level knowledge of electronics if not more

This UC Berkeley EE40LX course is a completely different beast. It is more akin to a college survey course.   From looking at the syllabus and the material on the edX site it looks like it is perfect for the beginning hobbyist who wants to actually build something and do hands on with a breadboard and mcu or for someone who is contemplating a career in EE but not yet ready to commit to calculus, physics and a heavy theory class like 6002x.

Anyways that's my take.  I've signed up for it just to check it out.

BTW for a more in depth hands on MOOC course in analog electronics only (no mcus), the Coursera course Fundamentals of Electrical Engineering Laboratory is pretty good. I took it last year but they are not offering it again yet (an email from the instructor to past students says they are working on offering it again later). It has an accompaning theory course but I did not take that.

The amount of free learning currently available online is really quite astounding!

[Syntax_Error]

In defense of this course, it does appear in the syllabus to include a fair amount of analog material and basic principles. It does in fact start w/Kirchoff's Laws, which must include a treatment of Ohm's Law to be useful in most situations (nodal/mesh analyses, etc). The FAQ also claims to emphasize the analog and deemphasize the microcontroller aspects.

I think like most blogs these days, this course is using the microcontroller/robot as the hook to get the interest of the student/young player, and then ties the course material back to it frequently to keep them. It's not a bad strategy overall, even if it doesn't appeal to people not interested in robotics (me).

Education: 1.Inspire 2.Inform 3a.Evaluate 3b.Experiment 4.Repeat
This is just a different way to skin the question/answer format of teaching. It's essentially the same thing with different labels.

I take the robot/micro as their Inspire phase. The material will Inform and Evaluate. The Experiments should cause as many questions as answers they generate, tying back to Inspire and whetting the students' appetite for the next round of Inform. For an introductory course, this strategy seems appropriate, where Inspire can be handled by "the reason why I came here" and Inform can be used to tie in areas the student would not have pursued on their own, exposing them to a wider survey of material, and just tying it back into the main theme so that they get what they came for.

[Simon]

I think like most blogs these days, this course is using the microcontroller/robot as the hook to get the interest of the student/young player, and then ties the course material back to it frequently to keep them. It's not a bad strategy overall, even if it doesn't appeal to people not interested in robotics (me).

Education: 1.Inspire 2.Inform 3a.Evaluate 3b.Experiment 4.Repeat

That is where modern education gets it all wrong, people who are suitable for the course are not stupid and those that are capable of completing the education will have the inspiration. If you have to inspire somebody by telling white lies about your course then you have failed on the education side. When I went to school in Italy I was one of few truly interested in electronics, the teacher was not even interested in electronics he would rather talk to the children about anything in the local dialect. So the result was that nothing got taught and the children would never have learnt not even if you tried to inspire them.

The best engineers in the world don't need inspiration. And those that need lying to in order to get them on a course will never make the sort of engineer we need. There are too many students being told that just wishing for a result will get them a result, and there are too many courses promising to tell you all without using any maths or heavy theory. I don't think we got into space or made any of our other major accomplishments in history on inspiration alone, and I don't think those teaching people who carry out these feats had to inspire them they probably could not keep up with teaching them and answering their questions fast enough. People either want to learn or they don't, and if they don't want to learn the boring bits and they need to be kept constantly excited then they are an utter waste of time.

We seem to live in a culture of results not of knowledge not of a willingness to learn or work anything out for ourselves, I seriously wonder just how quickly we will hit a point where we start going backwards and not forwards.

[mtdoc]

  Lying? Where did you get that?

[Syntax_Error]

Uh, ok?

I'm glad you are permanently inspired and don't "need" anyone to help you with your interest. That is always a plus when it's true.

But your comments are quite elitist and rather survival of the fittest. All I was saying is that this is a common strategy to broaden the interest and appeal of material. It certainly is better than "Read this book. If you survive, read the next one." until you have a degree. While I have a great deal of respect for engineering as a profession, it is not some mystical "Only the smartest shall survive" path resulting in awards and upper class status for survivors and eternal damnation for those lost along the way.

This is a free course. If people don't want to take it, then they won't. As for culture of unwillingness to learn, I see that as incompatible with the nature of a course like this.

Get real.

[Simon]

Yes of course it's a free course, my point is that often people are encouraged onto a course under false pretense, I'm not saying it's the case of this course. If it is a classroom based course encouraging people in under false pretense will mean that you have too many people in the classroom who are not actually suitable for the course and they will hold back everybody else. It's nothing to do with being elitist I have no qualifications myself at the moment to speak of but what I have learnt through self-study has been because I wanted to learn it and I knew that by learning it it would enable me to do the things I want to do but I understood that learning the last little bit would not get the results I need to understand everything underlying that. There are plenty of courses that claim that in a certain amount of weeks you will be able to do this that and the other and quite often it is not the case at all.

[mtdoc]

I just wanted to bump this up since this course is looking really good.  The first few weeks have taken students from ohm's law, KVL, KCL to Op amps with just enough MCU stuff thrown in to whet the appetite of those with that interest. The underlying theme of building a robot from scratch is a good way to keep it practical  - with just enough theory to keep it real.    As a former college teacher, I've been very impressed with the teaching style. So far it's been review for me but as someone fairly new to all this I can see how for a complete beginner this would be a really fun, painless way to learn. 

So bottom line, as an introductory electronics class with both analog and digital components and excellent teaching, I highly recommend this!