Information and Notes

Thank you to everyone for your feedback, comments and suggestions.  Today’s blog post addresses many of the things you mentioned to me in your email messages and telephone calls.  It covers a wide range of topics but I thought that it might be useful to address them all at once.

Charges for Coursera classes 

Coursera is a tricky platform.  When I first received a complaint about being prompted to give a credit card when registering for a class, I contacted Coursera.  The reply I received was clearly a type of form letter.  The claim is that the vast majority of courses offered on Coursera have a free option.  The message went on to talk about “premium content” which are generally not free but can be “previewed” for up to 7 days. 

So, I did a bit of investigation on my own.  It is true that for a “premium course” I was confronted with the request to enter a credit card number.  It is also true that I would only be charged if I continued on the “preview” option beyond 7 days.  Some of the older Coursera courses have absolutely no charge associated with them.  Most of the classes created after 2015 seem to have both free and fee options.  As with other MOOCs such as EdEx, the main benefit of the fee option is to receive a certificate of completion at the end of the course.  Other benefits of the fee option, depending on the course include being able to take graded exams, do practice exercises and take part in group discussions.

Many of the R or data-science related courses are classified as “premium”.  This is understandable because these topics and skills are currently in very high demand.  Coursera courses also tend to have a high reputation relative to other MOOCs which likely makes it easier for them to charge and get people to pay.  So if you are most interested in a particular course and it happens to be a premium one, it may come down to a choice of deciding whether you think you can finish it in 7 days, you are willing to pay the cost or you would rather just look for another course which isn’t a premium one.

One thing that I suggest is that if someone has found a particularly good free course on R, in particular, to let me know or share it in the blog post for R and Data Science classes.

Links in my blog not opening a new browser tab

Yesterday I received a suggestion that I have my blog configured so that links open into a new tab so that the blog stays open and it is easy to go back to it when they are ready to look at the next link.

Years ago when I made my own websites and did some web programming, I used to be able to define what action would occur when a link was clicked.  I thought that if I could get into the source code of the blog, I could fix it.  When I tried “view source” in Chrome, I ended up basically not being able to edit anything of importance in my Blogger posts.  I eventually found a solution in a Blogger geek forum.  The unfortunate part is that I would need to do some upgrades that I’m not in a position to do at the moment.   If I continue using my blog in the long-term, I will likely upgrade to something that gives me more flexibility.

Appreciating the annoyance of having to keep finding the blog page each time a link is explored, there is a way to get a new tab to open.  I appreciate that it is an inconvenience to blog readers but it’s the best option that I can offer on a short timeframe.  This is to right-click on the link and then select “open in new tab” option. 

Problems with remote access to Scopus and ScienceDirect

While this was not part of my blog posts, many of you have called me and sent email messages about getting remote access to these products when off the AAFC network.  There are some instructions floating around regarding how a person can set up an account for these products while on the AAFC network and then request a link for remote access to be sent to your email address.  Some of those who have had accounts on Scopus for a while have had some level of success with this although the ability to access the PDFs of the journal articles seems to be problematic.  I had a few of you test these instructions and, so far, nobody has had complete success.

This is just to let you know that library staff have been in conversation with the vendors to get instructions that work and have also been testing instructions.  For the time being, though, it appears that the only sure-fire way to get full access to Scopus and ScienceDirect is to use them while logged into the AAFC network.  I know that this is not possible for everyone.

As a reminder, library staff (information specialists) are always available to do lit searches for you and/or to retrieve documents if you have the citations for them.  Network access appears to have improved so the turn-around time for getting articles to you should be faster.

Suggestions and comments on topics already covered in blog posts

Many of you have provided feedback about the courses you’ve taken from the lists I’ve provided.  Others have suggestions of other good courses that weren’t found on my list.  If you think that this information would be useful to others, feel free to add a comment to my blog post.  I understand that if you don’t already have certain types of social media accounts adding a post is a bit of a headache.  So, if you want to share the information but can’t post something, just ask me to post it and I can do that for you.

The question of information overload

I come from an extended family of teachers.  One of my teacher relatives sent me an email from her director of education which implored teachers to not overwhelm families with too many links to courses and other learning resources.    This line in the message struck me:

We are all in different situations under different circumstances, we have our own families to take care of, keep entertained, and most importantly, keep safe.  Please send your links and resources, but take a step back and enjoy time with your family and text a staff.  I understand we are getting paid to do our jobs, but does our job mean to endure more stress under these uncertain times? does our job mean to ignore our own children, wives, husbands, parents in the background when they need US the most?  does our job mean overwhelming ourselves and these families with vast amount of resources that are already easily accessible with a click of a button?    

While I have not had a sense of “information overload” from AAFC staff, I thought that it would be worth it to ask the question.  In fact, if anything, what I have heard is that people are looking for training resources for themselves and their children.  This being said, I would be interested in hearing whether the provision of the information I post on my blogs is helpful or does having to scan through them every few days just add to the stress load.