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I've been "tasting" the various online courses for the last 15 months or so: started with Dr. Thrun's online AI course, have contacts with people at edX, have taken or viewed courses from a half-dozen entities.

One salient aspect of all of the MOOCs is their overall poor quality.

While it's true most early MOOC courses are a bit limited in interaction, pedagogy, assessment, etc, they have already had an interesting effect on universities.

I've been working on smart teaching tech on and off for nearly 10 years, including on an older project by some of the people behind edX at MIT. More recently I've been looking to bring online into the lecture theatre. For most of the time I've worked on teaching technology, I've often heard the reaction that's all well and good but no-one really cares about teaching because academics are promoted on their research and teaching is just something we do to bring in the cash. (There's always been some academics and centres who are very interested in teaching innovation, but it's seemed to me like they've not had as much attention from the rest of academia as they should have.) In the last year or so that seems to have changed. There's a lot more attention been drawn to the idea that yes now is the time to make some changes to how teaching is viewed and done in universities.

I've been "tasting" the various online courses for the last 15 months or so: started with Dr. Thrun's online AI course, have contacts with people at edX, have taken or viewed courses from a half-dozen entities.

One salient aspect of all of the MOOCs is their overall poor quality.

The teachers are, as a general rule: smart, familiar with the subject, nice people, and well meaning.

The online courses are, as a general rule: boring, poorly presented, supported by poor online tools, and counter-instructive.

Everyone realizes that education is changing, and that in ten years or so there will only be a few players left. Everyone wants desperately to be one of those players, so you have everyone frantically recording lectures and putting them online in a desperate attempt to remain relevant.

Sebastian. Thrun's AI course never bothered to check or correct errors in content, resulting in massive frustration from the students. Anant Agarwal's electronics course had students drowning in directionless theory that suddenly uncovered a useful equation. Daphne Koller's presentation style makes the simplest concepts appear dense.

To give an representative example, Kristin Sainani over at Coursera is running a course on scientific writing (writing for purposes of a published paper, or review of said paper &c). The course content is very good, but the students edit and grade each others' homework.

Perhaps 80% of the students speak almost no English. The end result: 80% of the editing work is tediously instructing other students not on course content, but on basic English (when to use articles, which prepositions to use when, &c), while 80% of the corrections you receive for your work are utterly useless. The overall experience is "massive waste of time for a course of heavily diluted value".

There are occasional standout exceptions, but the overall quality is very low. No one has quite realized that you can't just videotape a lecture and put it up on the web - you have to plan things out ahead of time, add good production value, and have good support. It's not easy, and no one group so far is doing it particularly well.

Online learning is still in beta. Perhaps in a couple of years the technology will mature.

http://www.ai-class.com/

For AI, I would suggest enrolling into the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Course. It will start on October 10th this year and lasts until December (I think).

I'm in a similar age category. And some things are harder for me to pick up these days. But other things aren't.

I'm not really trying to learn new languages at this point, over the last 15 years I've surveyed at least 150, and trying out small projects with at least 10 of the best ones.

Right now I'm going "back to school". Studying AI http://www.ai-class.com/, and Algorithms http://mitpress.mit.edu/algorithms/. I briefly toyed with the idea of studying Knuth, but it didn't seem practical for what I want to accomplish.

Why not work on some FOSS projects? Even fixing bugs can help keep the old gears turning. Better yet, start your own fun project.

TFS says that the online enrollment is open. I couldn't find any way to enroll, only a page where you can enter your name and email to "sign up [...] to receive more information about the online version when it becomes available". Am I missing something? Does anyone have a link to where you can truly enroll for the free version of the course?

The actual website for the course says "The class runs from Sept 26 through Dec 16, 2011." http://www.ai-class.com/