Unlike traditional online courses that charge a fee, limit enrollment and provide credit or certification, Moocs (massive open online courses) are usually free or low cost and can host hundreds of  thousands global participants.  Although MOOC have been around for years in the form of collective techie learning gatherings, participation in 2012 has ballooned at a rapid pace likened to FaceBook in its heyday.  According to The Year of the MOOCarticle in the New YorkTimes, edX, a nonprofit start-up backed by Harvard and MIT, had 370,000 registrants in the fall of its first official courses. This paled in comparison to the amount of students that Courseraattained in its first year of online learning opportunities, 1.7 million!

Will MOOCs Replace education as we know it?

Like any new trend, massive participation in online classes has its challenges. Lynda Weinman has ample experience when pointing out that they are by no means a replacement for formal education.  As a former digital animator, special effects designer and classroom college teacher, Linda paved the path for an earlier version of MOOC education in the mid 90’s when she founded Lynda.comas an aide to her own students. Over four million students and 2,200 courses later she’s confident when clarifying that many of the collegespartnered with Lynda.com use the tutorials as added features to their existing courses.  When asked in an interview with ReadWriteBuilders, if high technical companies look at online programs in terms of advancement as a supplement to traditional education or as a way for people to further their careers, Lynda feels that “it’sjust one example of something that you can do to enhance your attractiveness to potential employers. But [it’s also important to have] a portfolio and body of work, references that actually work out, showing that you had success in the past.”

MOOC Benefits:

It’s the eternal conundrum of a hiring manager – you have to hire for every single position in the company without any first-hand experience. How to do it? If you can have a trusted programmer sit in on the interview, that’s ideal, of course. But what if you’re hiring your first programmer? Or what if you’re hiring a freelancer? Or what if company policy dictates that you’re the only person allowed to do the interviewing? Well, in that case, you need some helpful advice and your innate bullshit detector. We questioned programmers and hiring managers and compiled a list of dos and don’ts. Here are some things to ask when interviewing programmers:

Past Experience

Ask the programmer about the biggest disaster of his career so far, and how he handled it. Did he come in at midnight to fix the code? Was he unaware of the problem until someone brought it up? Did someone else handle it?  According to our programmer sources, “Anyone worth their salt has caused a major meltdown. If they say they haven’t, they’re lying. Or very, very green.” Pushing a code with bugs in it isn’t necessarily bad. Not handling it well is bad.

As usual, your biggest asset is not knowing the field, it is knowing people. Asking about career disasters can be uncomfortable, but if the interviewee is experienced and honest then she won’t have a problem telling you about it, and you will get an idea of how she handles mishaps. Even if you don’t understand what the disaster was or how it was fixed, you should be able to tell how honest she’s being and how she handles being put on the spot.

Getting involved with the IT, or Internet Technology industry, is a way for you to break into a variety of potential coveted career paths and job openings. Whether you prefer working with the back-end of programming or if you enjoy improve user experience while browsing online, there are many different in-demand IT skills that are useful to obtain today if you are seeking a career in the tech industry yourself.

Cloud Computing

Working with cloud computing, otherwise known as "the cloud", requires you to work within various types of servers that store and access data globally from any location. With the increase in mobile usage, cloud computing is becoming even more prevalent in today's society. When you want to work with cloud computing, understanding the basics of programming and network security is a must. Working in cloud computing is a way to help with building new applications, expanding companies online as well as allowing anyone internationally to locate and access a specific blog, website or mobile app.

UX Design

UX Design is also known as user experience design. A user experience designer specializes in understanding the usability and overall experience a web visitor has when browsing on a site or blog. UX design is essential to ensure that all visitors on a website are capable of navigating the blog properly and accessing the site's content with ease, regardless of the browser they are using or the type of device that is being used to access the site itself. Cross-browser compatibility and ensuring that all websites you are working with are accessible via mobile platforms is another responsibility of many UX designers today. Working in UX design is highly recommended if you believe you have an eye for "good" web design and if you have an interest in improving the overall experience web users for a specific audience have when visiting the blog or website you represent or that you are building for yourself.

IT Security

IT security is one of the fastest-growing positions throughout the entire IT industry and field. IT security requires you to understand network infrastructures as well as how to properly manage each server individually to provide security and protection from potential hackers and online thieves looking to steal sensitive data and information. Maintaining the security of a network and all servers for a company is only becoming more popular with the expansion of mobile phone usage along with the growth of the Internet altogether.

Understanding the variety of IT skills that are in demand today can help you to better decide on a path that is right for you. The more you understand about various IT skills, the easier it is to find a position or career in your future that is most suitable for the type of work you enjoy. Whether you are looking to develop new apps or if you are interested in managing the security of company servers, there are hundreds of positions and skills that are in demand in the IT industry today.

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F# is excellent for specialties such as scientific computing and data analysis. It is an excellent choice for enterprise development as well. There are a few great reasons why you should consider using F# for your next project.

Concise

F# is not cluttered up with coding noise;  no pesky semicolons, curly brackets, and so on. You almost never have to specify the kind of object you're referencing because of its powerful type inference system. It usually takes fewer lines of code to solve the same issue.

Convenient

Common programming tasks are much easier in F#. These include generating and using state machines, comparison and equality, list processing, as well as complex type definitions. It is very easy to generate powerful and reusable code because functions are first class objects. This is done by creating functions that have other functions as parameters or that combine existing functions to generate a new functionality.

Correctness

F# has a strong type system, and, therefore, prevents many common errors such as null reference exceptions. Valuables are immutable by default which, too, prevents a huge class of errors. You can also encode business logic by utilizing the type system. When done correctly, it is impossible to mix up units of measure or to write incorrect code thereby decresing the need of unit tests.

Concurrency

F# has number of built-in libraries. These libraries help when more than one thing at a time is occurring. Parallelism and asynchronous programming are very simple. There is also a built-in actor model as well as excellent support for event handling and functional reactive programming. Sharing state and avoiding locks are much easier because data structures are immutable by default.

Completeness

F# also supports other styles that are not 100 percent pure. This makes it easier to interact with the non-pure world of databases, websites, other applications, and so on. It is actually designed as a hybrid functional/OO language. F# is also part of the .NET ecosystem. This gives you seamless access to all the third party .NET tools and libraries. It operates on most platforms. These platforms include Linux and smartphones via mono. Visual Studio is integrates with F# as well. This means you get many plug-ins for unit tests, a debugger, a IDE with IntelliSense support, other development tasks. You can use MonoDevelop IDE on Linux.

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