Roxana-Mălina Chirilă

The Fiction of Relationship (free course)

This one just began.

So, my current passion are MOOCs (massive online open courses). And my huge passion is Coursera, which gathered some of the best universities out there and had their wonderful professors teach all sorts of topics – for free.

Many sources out there say that the current way things stand, with Coursera being both high-quality and free, is not sustainable. They foresee an end to this. So, for God’s sake, just go for this. It’s a huge opportunity. You can learn from the best – and they’re explaining things neatly, in such a way as you can understand them, for free. I have no idea how to get across the hugeness of this, the awesome opportunities.

So, as the title of the post says, I enrolled in The Fiction of Relationship, of which I watched four of the introductory lessons and I can tell you that the professor, Arnold Weinstein, is everything I could have wished for in a university teacher. He does the humanities right – no trying to fight with the sciences on their ground. No big words, no attempt to teach you the post-modern way to do things – critical and ironic. In fact, he actually says he expects us to enjoy reading.

Just enroll on Coursera, if you aren’t there yet, and watch a video or two. They’re just barely over 10 minutes long each. It’s worth it. Trust me. It’s a bit about how we think about relationships, it’s about how we construct our relationships (they’re fictions inside our heads… or are they?) and it’s about books on relationships and it looks like it will be so much more.

I’ve often mentioned that I have an MA degree in British Cultural Studies. And I will sometimes mention that my Master’s program was a bad joke, a sad attempt to be all high and mighty and important about the humanities. I would have loved to have a course like this for credit. It makes sense. The readings look nice (currently going through the first one). And it looks like it will be helpful in understanding the world.

Go! Before the first week is over! Enroll! Maybe you can even earn one of those nice Coursera certificates, which have little economic value as of yet and a lot of „Yay! I am Awesome!” value.


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