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Take online courses to improve, acquire skills

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Massive Open Online Courses may not (yet) be a path to obtaining a degree, but they are certainly a great way to improve your knowledge in a particular field or to simply learn something new. FILE

When Miss Lucy went to pick up her tablet at the Belgacom store in Waterloo a couple of weeks ago, the shop assistant helped her to set it up and even created an email account for her. But try as she might, Miss Lucy couldn’t get the device to work on her network at home and nor could I, when I called in for our weekly cup of tea.

Long-distance instructions from her son who lives in France were not of much help and we gave up the whole enterprise after a fruitless hour and had a nice chat instead.

As I left, though, I couldn’t help but feel that I had let Miss Lucy down and that she might decide that digital was, after all, well beyond her ken.

Clearly, I don’t know Miss Lucy well; she got her grandson Jérôme to come around for a bite to eat and a go at the troublesome tablet and the next time I called round we were able to spend some time discovering its features, reading about her favourite authors on-line and photographing Câline the cat.

Now Miss Lucy tells me that she has signed up for some IT classes – which she will be taking in Dutch - come the new academic year in September.

She’ll be taking the classes at the same learning centre where she has been perfecting her written Italian; Miss Lucy is going to be 87 years old in August.

GLTT is an adult learning centre in her neighbourhood which is subsidised by the Ministry of Education and where, for a reasonable amount of money one can choose from any of a large selection of language courses which include Chinese, Japanese and Arabic.

With backing from the European Social Fund of the European Commission, and in partnership with Actiris - the public employment agency of the Brussels region - my own commune of Etterbeek has a continued learning and education centre where, for a heavily subsidised fee one can earn a bachelor’s degree in accounting, marketing, IT, secretarial studies and languages.

Those on unemployment benefits, the physically disabled and minors under the age of 18 pay a token annual fee of only 50 euros to attend classes that are given in the afternoons and evenings.

Inspired by Miss Lucy - without, however, signing up for evening classes - I recently joined the world of continued learning and have just finished a six-week course on nutrition, health and lifestyle which was taught on-line to over 40,000 students by a lecturer at the Vanderbilt University in Tennessee.

From the comfort of my couch and with my laptop on my lap I enjoyed improving my knowledge of a subject for which I have developed a strong passion partly driven by my hypochondriac tendencies.

I’m now getting ready – along with another 25,000 students worldwide – to start on an eight-week course entitled “Sustainability of Food Systems: A Global Life Cycle Perspective” which I am sure will improve my understanding of that other pet subject of mine, organic agriculture.

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are radically democratising higher learning as hundreds of thousands of students from around the world who lack access to elite universities use them as a means to acquire marketable skills without paying fees or obtaining a degree.

Listed among the top 10 MOOCs providers are such centres of academic excellence as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Yale and Harvard which offer courses in anything from abstract algebra to quantum mechanics.

MOOCs may not (yet) be a path to obtaining a degree but they are certainly a great way to improve your knowledge in a particular field or to simply learn something new.

The writer is a Kenyan residing in Brussels.