Introductions

#88

Welcome, @genebrown and @jojo!

I choose to believe it. :smile:
Itā€™s a great name!

#89

Thank you Jeff for mentioning saylor to me! I am definitely looking forward to starting a class soon. I am currently still looking through your courses and reading all the commentsā€¦ So far very impressive !
Gladys Ondari

#90

Hi, I am Dhruv from India, currently an undergraduate pursuing Engineering ā€¦ Not exactly new to Saylor.org, i discovered in the latter half of my winter vacations last year, so i vowed to return this summer to do some of the courses. Little disappointed thought at the fact that most of the engineering courses plus the requisite engineering mathematics has been pushed to the legacy courses section. Not a major setback tho bcoz knowledge gained is not knowledge wasted. but still i will implore the staff to look into it again since saylor.org is one of the only sites i know which used to offer such high quality engineering related courses.

Thanks for the awesome work you are doingā€¦

#91

Hi Everyone,
Iā€™m Murugan from Mauritius a little island in the Indian Ocean, Iā€™m in the field of building construction, most especially in design. I have just joined Saylor Academy and Iā€™m eager to start courses available here. Lots of subjects is of my interest and I thank Saylor Academy to offer these courses for free to people like us who canā€™t afford them. I have a personal request, if possible I donā€™t know. Is it possible to offer Architect courses? These courses is very expensive and we should travel to another country to become an architect. That would be a great help to me.

Thanks a lot I hope to share ideas and views of common interest.

Regards
Murugan Y. Pragassen

#92

Welcome Murugan! Iā€™m one of the staff members here.

We are unlikely to offer architecture in the foreseeable future ā€“ not because it is not a great topic, but because new course development is limited now while we improve what we have. What would change that is a strong partner that wants to work with us to build architecture courses or, in future, sufficient interest from the community if we go on a course-building spree.

I think ā€“ I hope! ā€“ that you can find a lot of good courses here that support architecture: math, computer science, art history, business for instance. I would also recommend looking at Udemy.com, Alison.com, Coursera.org, and ocw.mit.edu, among others. A quick search shows mostly non-technical courses, however.

In any event, your request is heard and noted, and we are glad to have you here :smile:

#93

Hi my name is Davy Ndlovu from Zimbabwe. I am a cultural activist. I work to promote indigenous cultures and currently I am working with the San.

#94

Dear Karen:

Good luck to you as well. I just turned 54 and discovered saylor last year and love it. I have an a.s. in technology from city college of san francisco and it idid not want to go to san francisco state university to study computers so this has been my answer.

#95

Evening/Morning/Afternoon Saylor.org followers and creators.

My name is David, Iā€™m floating in a little city called Christchurch in New Zealand and recently found the time to study and have started the Computer Science trail.

Iā€™ve been working in IT for 10 years now but I can never say no to learning more. This has given me a good sequence to work through and fill the gaps between experience and learned fundamentals.

Hopefully I will be spending more time in the forums (where I can, got a lot of study you know!!!).

Cheers,
David Gould

#96

Hi. Iā€™m new here. Iā€™ve signed to take the HIST103 course. I thought I had figured how the Saylor couses work, but now that I joined Discourse and looked a bit, I find myself a bit confusedā€¦more on that later.

First, Iā€™ll properly introduce myself. If you are interested in more details than what Iā€™m about to say here, then please feel free to have a peek at my Discouse user profile. Anywayā€¦

Iā€™m a mid-40s, longtime married woman. Aside from a belief in lifelong learning, my biggest passions in life are my love of animals and my happy addiction to reading and collecting books.

I have MS and have been able to work for many years. I chose to register with Saylor Academy because it offers courses in some of the areas of my interests, including history, literature and philosophy. And after speaking with the super helpful Nathan Thompson, I learned that most of the course curriculum for my areas of interest, is text based. (A must for me.)

Bu getting back to my confusion, are there actual discussions here for each chapter of every course? Also, why are there private and public choices for the settings on our e-profile pages? Are we supposed to publicly post our progress here on Discourse and/or on our Saylor profile pages?

Sorry if this all sounds too obvious, but any help would be greatly appreciated. :slight_smile:

#97

My name is PAtrick Fallah-Hollist i am new to Saylor Academy so i am looking to make new acedemicfriends mainly computer science

#98

Hi Patrick!

Iā€™m a newbie here too and not (at the moment, at least) taking any of the computers sciences, just wanted to say hi. Good luck with your courses! :slight_smile:

#99

Alexander here, 30 and from the UK. Work a full time job but I always like to challenge myself and am quite impressed at the ethos and general set up of Saylor. Never went to university as I really couldnā€™t afford it.

Doing PSYCH101 and enjoying it so far. Feeling quite grateful to be able to do something like this with the quality of the materials Iā€™ve seen.

Kind regards

Alex

#100

Whew! As a Saylor staffer, Iā€™m always happy when the introductions thread gets a bit away from me. Welcome all!

I think everyone can benefit form a couple quick thoughts on @Wordsgood95ā€™s questions.

No. Or yesā€¦up to you! Some course have specific discussion prompts. That is why ARTH101, for instance, shows up often in these forums. But people are free and encouraged to start their own conversations about courses ā€“ to raise questions, to respond publicly to their reading, etc.

The best way to do so, at present, is to start a new topic and choose the appropriate category and, if applicable, a subcategory. Make the title of the topic something fairly specificā€¦For HIST103, the category is Courses and the sub-category is History. Putting the course code in the topic title is a good practice (although we may get into using tags one of these days). In fact, here is a live example post I just made.

Eportfolio is a strange beast, and some changes are on the way. We had once meant to build more social features into eportfolio ā€“ the ability to follow or favorite othersā€™ profiles. We also have considered eportfolio to be one way to display your work and certificates to an employer or whomever. For those reasons, it was important to let people make their profiles fully private, public only to other students, public by link only, or fully public. Discourse, then, is really taking over the social aspects of eportfolio. Because Discourse is public-only, we wanted to allow people to use a nickname and have the freedom to participate in discussion on their own terms.

The question of how to use Discourse to its fullest as a tool for social learning is probably worth its own separate discussion, possibly in the Meta category.

Enough writing for now! Welcome again to all :smile:

#101

Hello Everyone,
My name is Pierre Noumbissi,Iā€™m from Douala cameroon.I Would like to share my political opinions on this course with all of you.
All the Best.

#102

Thank you, Sean! That helps with some of my confusion. The e-profile page thoughā€¦not so much, but as changes are apparently underway, Iā€™ll just plug along for now. :slight_smile:

And thank you for the welcome!

#103

hello everybody,
I am Ibrahem Hanafi a medical student at the faculty of medicine of Damascus university
I was born in 14/1/1994 in Damascus/Syria and I am still living there.
I am interested in neurology, medicine, mathematics, programming and English language
wish you all the best of luck
and Iā€™d like people who have the same interests as me to add me on their network on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/ibrahemhanafi

#104

Hooray for networking! Hope you find some great connections :smile:

You can put your LinkedIn link on your profile as well:
Visit your profile and select ā€œpreferencesā€.

One more thing ā€“ welcome!

#106

Hi there! My name is Maxwell, Iā€™m a 23 year old father attempting to ā€œjailbreakā€ an education in computer science in an effort to breakaway from a litany of dead-end jobs and find my way into a career. Iā€™m not entirely certain where in the world of technology I will end up, but I know that this is where I feel most in my element.

I havenā€™t enrolled in any courses as of now, but Iā€™ve read through the syllabus for several of the computer science courses and so far have been impressed by what Iā€™ve come across.

#107

Welcome & thanks for the introduction :smile:

Jumping in on CS101 is a pretty safe bet, even as just ā€œsomething to doā€ while you think of whatā€™s next ā€“ or a way to accomplish smaller, specific lessons with the little bit of time you may have, as a parent. It relies significantly on Bradley Kjellā€™s Java tutorials, which, while showing their age a little in terms of visual style, are engaging and accessible, IMO.

#108

Howdy!!! My name is Elizabeth and I am new. So far I like the setup and I think its cool.