The MOOC and Me: Validation

I received my certificate from the Catholic University of Louvain for "successfully" completing the course Paradigms of Computer Programming.

"Successfully" is in quotes because it turned out I was in over my head and, while I did learn a great deal on the philosophical/abstract side, the practical work was mostly beyond my current skill level and the certificate represents what we used to call, back when college was for wastrel scions (aka "Legacies") who needed a little polishing before entering the family business, a "Gentleman's C."* It certainly doesn't qualify me to do anything other than, maybe, discuss tail-recursion and nod knowingly when others speak of explicit state, data abstraction and object oriented programming.

I downloaded everything I could from the course, mostly lectures and slides and such which I can now review at my leisure, but the problem sets, which were where I fell down, could not be saved.

In the meantime, I can now get back to the Harvard CS50 Introduction to Programing course which I had to suspend because Louvain had a tight deadline for completion. (Turns out it was too tight and they had to extend it by two weeks or risk losing a number of students but I still couldn't do both at the same time. Also didn't help that my laptop crashed right at the deadline for completing the final exam.) CS50 is geared much more to someone of my noobiness and is practically open-ended requiring only that I complete it by the end of the year. Plus the upcoming problem sets look to be much more fun, and less academically mathematical, than the Louvain ones.

Of course, none of the above is hinted at in the Louvain certificate, which will look good on the wall.

*The concept is not entirely obsolete. Cf: W at Yale.