Harvard for free

About a year and a half ago, I received a scholarship from the Mexican government's Secretaria de Economia to study an online training course designed by the Harvard School of Business, called Manager Mentor, http://harvardbusiness.org/harvard-managementor. The cost of the training program is about $400.00 for one year, includes 44 modules and is available in Spanish, Portuguese, French and Mandarin. Since it was the Mexican government paying the bill, I took the course in Spanish. It was a wonderful opportunity that I put to good use as I was starting up my small, eco-business.

Now, I am back at Harvard, so to say, taking the Harvard Edx computer science class taught by David Malan, called CS50x. A perfect example of a massive open online courses, the class started in October 2012 and ends in April 2013. I am just one of the thousands of students who have enrolled world wide, so far there are 155,000 students enrolled in the course according to Harvard Magazine, http://harvardmagazine.com/2012/11/classroom-in-the-cloud

I have been working on my very first assignment, to create a program using Scratch, scratch.mit.edu. While the students at Harvard take advantage of in person walk throughs and office hours, Edx students have recorded walk throughs and access to chat rooms and online support groups. I am also fortunate enough to have friend Mark Emmer mentor my computer science learning in lieu of the in person support that on campus students receive. Mark has also enrolled in the course, to help me through the weeks ahead.