In a previous post I discussed about online education. Among the final reflections that I shared, one was about the certificates:
Certificates: all three courses are not official Stanford courses, though the instructors send a “Statement of Accomplishment” after satisfactory performance and completion of the course. I guess that with time more institutions will go towards this model. I even think that official certificates will be delivered for these kind of online education.
I have started to receive the certificates from those courses that I completed. The first one in arriving was from “A Crash Course on Creativity“. Note that in fact it is called “Certificate of Accomplishment”, not being an official certificate from Stanford:
Statement of Accomplishment of “A Crash Course on Creativity”, Stanford University Venture Lab.
You may note the remark at the bottom of the certificate:
PLEASE NOTE: SOME ONLINE COURSES MAY DRAW ON MATERIAL FROM COURSES TAUGHT ON CAMPUS BUT THEY ARE NOT EQUIVALENT TO ON-CAMPUS COURSES. THIS STATEMENT DOES NOT AFFIRM THAT THIS STUDENT WAS ENROLLED AS A STUDENT AT STANFORD UNIVERSITY IN ANY WAY. IT DOES NOT CONFER A STANFORD UNIVERSITY GRADE, COURSE CREDIT OR DEGREE, AND IT DOES NOT VERIFY THE IDENTITY OF THE STUDENT.
Some more questions to debate:
Would that stop you from taking a course?
If you had not completed some other studies before: would you go for these courses? Would you build your student records based on this kind of certificates?
If you were an employer: would you recruit somebody which key skill was acquired through such kind of course? (“it does not verify the identity of the student”)
Those who know me are aware that I tend to sleep between 4 and 6 hours on week days, rarely more, thus I could easily relate to the topic of the exercise, but I had never seen it like a problem. It is more like I viewed sleeping time as time not dedicated to doing something else, to accumulating experiences…
The thing I liked more about the exercise was the challenge posed by the teacher, Tina Seelig, “your team should submit at least 100 solutions for the problem you are solving”. So there we were, having to come up not with few solutions to a problem we didn’t even see as a problem but having to provide at least 100 solutions to it! I loved it.
In the course Technology Entrepreneurship we had done an exercise to facilitate brainstorming by intentionally looking for the worstbusiness ideas. Coming up with the wildest ideas, ideas that we knew would not work. In this same course on creativity we had to produce a video connecting and combining different objects to create a new sport (see the video here). So with these ideas, looking for the wildest, even worst ideas, connecting and combining them, we launched ourselves into the brainstorming…
Setting the target in 100, a wild absurdly high number, made it even easier than if we had been asked for 10 solutions, which would have probably led ourselves directly into evaluating ideas as they came in order to keep only the best ones.
See the result in the following Prezi prepared by Luis, one of the team members:
At the beginning of the year I started some online courses: Coding with Codecademy, Valuation and Corporate Finance with Coursekit (which was later acquired by Lore), and Game Theory and Model Thinking with Coursera.
Together with other life and work commitments, it became tough to follow the courses and in the end I dropped them.
In autumn I received an email from a friend pointing to another online course: “Finance” from Venture Lab platform. I took a look at it… In the end I subscribed to 3 course from that platform: “Finance”, “Technology Entrepreneurship” and “A Crash Course on Creative Thinking”.
They were simultaneous and finishing them has been quite challenging; but this time, yes, I completed all of them.
I wanted to share with you some thoughts about the courses:
Finance: we could say that this was the more boring course for the general public (even though 32,500 students from all over the world subscribed to it… I don’t know how many completed it, probably less than 10%). It started with basic theory of interest and time value of money to get more into the fine details of term structure, building bond portfolios, risk measures, CAPM.
Every week there were about 1h30′ of videos to watch (some quite dull) and exercises to complete (not so easy to solve). On top of that, at mid-way through the course there was a project on bond portfolio (term structure calculation, immunization against rates changes, portfolio building) to be completed between teams.
Team working with different time-zones proved difficult in this project. But the possibility to discuss ideas and results, coupled with the online forum with dozens of students posting questions, problems, hints, etc., proved very valuable for the learning process.
A part from that, there was a textbook (“Investment Science” [PDF, 7MB], by David G. Luenberger) that could be consulted and, of course, Google ready to be posed all kinds of questions.
What did I learn? On the finance side: CAPM, time value of money, etc., were things I had already studied in the past, but not so the term structure, immunization and creation of bond portfolios, the detail and theory behind CAPM, etc. Other take away has been learning to use Microsoft Excel Solver Add-in to solve systems of equations (I hadn’t use it in the past).
Technology Entrepreneurship: Above 34,600 people from all corners of the world subscribed to this course. So many people with good ideas dream with setting up a company. I believe that is the best thing out of this course. You can feel the energy and passion in some of the teams.
The course consists of some weekly videos by the instructor (Chuck Eesley) and some assignment. The videos are great. Full of models, studies, cases, interviews to entrepreneurs, VCs, etc. Very rich content can be found there. The whole set of videos is available in Youtube, starting with the first video here.
This course was 100% practical and very fast-paced. You had to form a team and really get into launching a real product if you wanted to get the best out of the course. Assignments were due very one or two weeks, and included creating a business model canvas, identifying an opportunity, building a low-fidelity prototype of the product, testing the value proposition with customers, building a higher fidelity prototype, creating a marketing page and testing it… At the end of the course mentors for the team were also available.
Our team started out quite well. We all had a similar idea and completed the first steps (I posted about it), but later on we lost some momentum. It was a pity, but it also reflect how difficult is to form and work in a team in a start-up, especially as we were not seeing each other (based in the USA, France and UK). I guess that is one take-away of the course. Another lesson is related to the time you’re willing to commit to it. If carrying out the exercises took some time, starting a company will be a totally different undertaking… a full-time job.
From this perspective, it is good also the last assignment of the course, the “Personal Business Plan”. With it you can reflect on personal priorities, what you’re willing to do, how do you see yourself in some years time, etc.
A Crash Course on Creative Thinking: As I already explained in a previous post, I joined this course because I thought it could be fun and it consisted mainly on forcing yourself to be creative, to do things that you would normally never do. I was surprised to see that almost 41,600 students subscribed to it (more than to any of the previous 2 courses.
This course was light on videos and reading materials. It mainly consisted on completing the assignments. For that you had to break your comfort zone some times and always be on the look out for ideas. Some of the exercises included: observation of shops, filming a video combining objects to create a new sport, brainstorming for 100 solutions to a given problem, creating stories…
What did I learn? From the learning side I could mention the innovation engine model of the instructor, Tina Seelig, or the 6 thinking hats from de Bono. But more important than that was the idea of combining solutions, setting wild objectives such as coming up not with 10 ideas, but 100!
General reflections:
Videos need to be engaging. It would be also good if the materials were available for reading in all cases.
Team working proved difficult online: different time zones, tight deadlines, not being able to meet each other…
Feedback from other students: some exercises required other groups to rate your work. This was a two-sided sword. Sometimes you would get good insightful comments and others a bad rating without feedback.
Time: “online” doesn’t mean easy, nor short, quick… If there are exercises to complete, videos to film and edit, projects to prepare… it will require time (the same as if the instruction was given offline).
Certificates: all three courses are not official Stanford courses, though the instructors send a “Statement of Accomplishment” after satisfactory performance and completion of the course. I guess that with time more institutions will go towards this model. I even think that official certificates will be delivered for these kind of online education.
Market place: One of the courses included a survey after course completion. Among the questions two caught my attention: they were related to the reasons behind having taken the course. Was it the topic only? The teacher? The institution? Once you can have access to the best teachers, the best universities, the most innovative courses from your home, some things will change. When laboratories or practical exercises are still needed the old system may still have an edge. But who would pay thousands of dollars to study finance from the best Harvard teacher when you can get it free from Stanford or Columbia. The certificate, yes… and what is more: what will be the place in this market for smaller universities without a name in the global market place?
If yesterday, I shared with you a video I made for a course on creativity, today I wanted to share: Wine app.
Some of you have already heard about it: another course I am taking from Stanford University Venture Lab is “Technology Entrepreneurship” (taught by Chuck Eesley). As part of it, we have been teaming in groups. In each of the groups we are studying the viability of some product or service. In our case: a wine app.
As part of the project we are carrying a survey, which many of you already received and quite some of you have answered (a big thanks!). If you haven’t, please take 3 minutes to help us with it.
I will keep you updated. Especially if we do come up with such an app .
This is the second season of this online course in Venture Lab. If you are only interested in the content of the lectures and not so much in learning process of working on the assignments, you may find the collection of videos here.
At the beginning of the year, as a yearly goal I decided to keep on learning new things. One of the actions I took was signing up for some courses (in Coursera platform).
The courses were great, the way of learning is very encouraging: with videos, small and bigger assignments, online forums, students from all over the world helping each other, aspiring career starters and retired people wanting to learn something new together in a global class.
I followed them for some weeks but finally I was unable to keep up with them and dropped. I felt frustrated for that.
Those of you who know me well might think “a course on creativity, how unlikely of Javier?”. Well, I decided to join it because I thought it could be fun… and some of the assignments are fun!
In this post I wanted to first raise awareness of this kind of free education and, secondly, to share the video I took last weekend in Seville for an assignment. Enjoy:
What was the assignment about?
“Your challenge is to use TWO HOUSEHOLD ITEMS of any type – to come up with a brand new SPORT. Use your creativity to generate something you have never seen before.
You will be evaluated on your creativity and presentation. Deliver a drawing, photo, or video demonstrating the sport. Feel free to include a short description.”
The visit was very interesting despite of the fact of not being able to descend into the under ground to see the tunnels that appear in the media so often. In fact, as we were informed by the researcher who guided our visit, all those images are from archives as at the moment radiation down there is high due to the experiments and no one can get down, everything is controlled from above the ground, being this monitoring room the closest you can get (including researchers from ATLAS, pictured in the photos).
ATLAS monitoring room
ATLAS monitoring room
As I said, tours and explanations were given by researchers contributing some of their time to science outreach: I found that fantastic, even if to some eyes the discourse might seem dull. To complement the visit some videos were displayed and I collected some brochures, that I have scanned and can now share in the blog (you see how timely the visit was!). If you are interested in the brochures, click on the links and you can retrieve them from Google docs:
Guided visits are free of charge but limited in number and group size, thus you need to make a reservation prior to going there. Needless to say that I strongly recommend the visit.
By the way, I’ve seen in many places people criticizing the Higgs boson nick as “God Particle”. The explanation is simple and funny and can be found here.
The book in which this nick first appeared, “The God Particle: If the Universe Is the Answer, What Is the Question?” is a tremendous piece of divulgative physics by the physicist Leon Lederman. I loved it because of the anecdotes he explains of his experiments, the humour he uses and the passion he transmits. I recommended this book once five years ago in Toastmasters, got it borrowed by a member and returned it after a week: “Javier, it’s not *that* easy, funny and entertaining” (obviously the person didn’t read more than 5% of it). Nevertheless, I continue to recommend it, especially if you know some teenager thinking about studying Physics.
Most of you, the readers of this blog, probably know that an airplane flies due to the difference in pressure between the upper (extrados) and lower (intrados) sides of its wing. This difference in pressure is due to the difference velocity of the airflow around both sides of the wing as you may see in the picture below:
Airflow around an airfoil (image from the Wikipedia, by Kraainnest).
As the speed above the wing is much higher, the difference in the pressure is mainly due to the lower pressure in the extrados. This can be seen in the following picture:
Pressure coefficient around an airfoil (by the Aircraft Aerodynamics and Design Group, Stanford University).
However, how could we see that in a real flight?
In commercial planes, of which wing skin is made of aluminium alloys this is not easily seen.
Two weeks ago, after my flight lesson was finished, I sat at the back of the plane to come back to Toulouse while my colleague had his lesson. It was then that I saw the image I captured in the following picture:
Wing extrados on air.
The aircraft we fly in our training lessons is a small Robin DR 400; a wooden aircraft of which wing skins are made of cloth. Not any cloth, but a type of polyester (PET) commonly used to build sailcloth, produced by Dupont and named Dacron. The surface is then lacquered with a polyurethane paint.
Robin DR 400 140
The air within the wing is at a higher pressure than the air in the extrados, and you can see how it expands and pushes up the cloth skin of the wing as you can see in the picture above.
You may see below the same wing on ground. Though the picture is of a lower quality, you can see that in this case the wing doesn’t look “inflated”.
About a month ago I started taking flight lessons at the ACAT aéro club, based in Lasbordes, a small aerodrome to the East of Toulouse.
I subscribed together with another Airbus colleague and both encouraged by a third colleague who had started some months beforehand.
Yesterday in the morning, the weather was not very good so we were not sure whether we would finally fly or not. Nevertheless, we had a theoretical lesson at first hour in the morning so we went to the aero club. At the break of the class, our instructor arrived and confirmed our flight. We took our stuff and skipped the second part of the class and headed towards the Robin DR-42 (F-GNNI) we flew.
For this second flight I decided to bring my Garmin GPS, which normally I use for sport activities, in order to record our flight, so that my colleague and I could better know where we had been flying. This will hopefully help us in getting to know better the Toulouse area from the air and with the navigation in the near future.
The flight was short and simple: practising pitching up/down, some steady turns and approach.
If you click on the map below you will be redirected to the Garmin website where you can read further information about the flight (time of the activity between switching on and off the engine) such as take-off, cruise and landing speeds. Do not pay attention to altitude figures, those reflected by Garmin are the ones of the terrain below (our track footprint).
Route of our flight: LFCL-LFCL
Some more pictures taken in yesterday’s class:
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Clarification: as we fly two pupils plus the instructor, each time we perform 2 flights, that is why I was siting at the back when I took pictures during flight.
Darren LaCroix is a Toastmasters member who won the World championship of public speaking in 2001. Last Friday, I attended a workshop on public speaking that he gave in Lisbon, just before our District 59 Spring conference.
The guy is impressive. The 3-hour workshop was fantastic. The deal was truly value for money.
He explained his story more or less in his winning speech from 2001, repeated at an event of the NSA in the following video:
10 years later, he is even better… but he wasn’t always like that. During the weekend he played another video of himself in the late 80´s. He was then a disaster of a public speaker. He then went on a journey of studying the best speakers and working hard to improve until being what he is today. This sounds very much as the American dream story… but having seen the video back then and seeing the dozens of shelves filled of videos and cassettes of speeches that he went through in those 10 years, there is little doubt of the truthfulness of that story. As he said “I use the tool of Toastmasters better than most”.
Some takeaways of the workshop
I will leave below some of the notes I took during the workshop, to share them with you and to have them properly stored for myself (still, if you get the chance of attending one of his workshops, do yourself the favour and book a place in it). Many of them are quotes either from him or from his coaches, sometimes I didn’t get right the source.
The most important part of a presentation: “The thought process in the audience’s mind”.
He introduced the concept of “salting” a presentation: getting your audience to want to hear your message before you deliver it (building up curiosity, tension).
The 4 most important habits to create:
Never turn down stage time (he even subscribed to 4 different club to “quadruple his failure rate”).
Record yourself every time (“yeah, it’s hard to listen to yourself… but guess who we have to listen to!”).
Be confident enough to be humble.
You must crave feedback.
“Habits are like train tracks: take a long time to put in place but once there they’ll take you anywhere”, Patricia Fripp.
On nervousness before an audience: “Did anyone come here to watch me fail?”
“Skill set without mindset will get your audience upset”.
Sometimes emphasizing is de-emphasizing (from the lyrics of some U2 song).
“Clarity and simplicity”, for the audience. Use the stage with a purpose.
“Don’t add humour, uncover humour”. Not especially in favour of adding others’ jokes, if you do that you have to say so.
If you are inauthentic and the audience senses that, they won’t follow you.
“Connect before you can educate, entertain and persuade” (he had greeted 90% of the audience individually before starting the workshop). As a curiosity he mentioned the movie “Avatar”, in which the creatures are connected through hair and ponytails, e.g. “the horse chooses the rider”, in the same way the goal of the speaker is to get the audience to like him.
For professional speakers the pay has to be a side effect.
We are not taught how to incorporate feedback.
“Toastmasters slogan should be: `The best place to make mistakes´”.
“The difference between good and great speakers is 100 speeches”, Dale Carnegie. An average Toastmaster member gives 3-4 speeches per year (it’d take 25 years to give 100). Take every opportunity you have to give speeches. He delivered his winning speech 22 times in the 3.5 months previous to the competition. “What is your stage time rate?”; join more clubs.
“Speaking as a dialogue, not a monologue”. Use pauses to give people time to reflect, especially when speaking to people of different cultures and when you ask rhetorical questions. Since pauses are uncomfortable for the speaker, give yourself something to do mentally, e.g. counting “1001, 1002, 1003…” (Internal dialogue)
Use stories
“Jesus did not use Power Point… he used parables”. Tell one to make a point; then another one to make another point. Use very clear transitions between stories. Be careful of narrating the story: not good to step in and out of the story. “Take us, don’t tell us”. A story goes directly into the subconscious.
“What can you do to tell the story without words?”. The emotion is in the eyes (“eye-motion”). Reaction tells the story.
In a story: at least one of the characters has to change the emotion from the beginning to the end. Focus on telling better stories. The audience needs to know who is speaking: the best way to achieve it is by using the name of the recipient of the message in the dialogue (no need to change position, just a heel-turn).
V.A.K.S. = Visual Auditory Kinesthetic Smell (strongest one is describing smell)
Invite the audience into the scene (use “you”). “I / you ratio”: Even when telling a personal story, use more times the pronoun “you”.
“Tap and transport”: ask a question about a personal memory of the audience and then bring them into your story (they’ll relate what you say with their story, it’ll be their story). Once telling the story is better to use present tense. Do not ask “How many of you…?”, use instead “Have you…?”, the test is that you would never ask to a friend in a 1-to-1 conversation “How many of you?”.
“It doesn’t matter what you see, it matters what the audience see when you say it”, Patricia Fripp.
Not in favour of memorizing a speech (internalize it). Never give a speech in front of a mirror. Do not memorize gestures (inauthentic).
What do you want the audience to do / think / feel after hearing your speech? You must be able to phrase that message in 10 words or less.
On the use of simple vocabulary/grammar: “the audience wants you present, not perfect”.
Hold the silence before starting the speech (shows confidence): the “Ed Tate scan”. How stable you are in the first 30 seconds tells the audience how stable the message is.
Let it go. The true story is not so important. You may have to twist some details or cut some parts.
Opening: CSI beginning, i.e. directly into the crime scene.
Do not preach. Don’t tell people what to do (“you should”), instead tell what you did, what “we” could do, etc…
Recordings of Toastmasters finals speeches can be found at: Bill Stephens Productions. Darren found out that the champions:
Had a coach.
Paused.
Used Word to write the speeches (counting words).
Had a sparkle in the eye (they owned the stage).
If there is anything we should take home from the workshop, it is: “Stage time, stage time, stage time”.
During the Table Topics session of last week’s Toastmasters Madrid meeting, a friend asked one of the members whether he was the type of person that used to set goals for himself or have New Year’s resolutions.
The member was very determined in his answer: “yes, I am definitely a fan of goal-setting”. He cited a study in Harvard Business School where they found that the 3% of graduates who had written goals, and plans to accomplish them, ten years later were earning ten times as much as the other 97% put together… (it doesn’t say whether within that 3% there was a single individual, the kind of Bill Gates, who made himself just those ten times of the remaining 97%).
Then I saw a Facebook status update by another friend: “85% of my personal goals for this year – achieved.” (Bear in mind that this fellow is an outstanding individual).
Finally, two days ago I found in Twitter a retweet of another post by Sid Savara about how to undertake a personal year-end review.
… Why not?
I decided that this year I’ll start writing down my goals and attaching a detailed plan to achieve them, instead of just thinking on January 1st of a few well-intentioned resolutions such as “learn languages”, “lose some pounds”, etc., and forgetting them by the 3rd of January. (By the way, thanks to Sergio, Javier, Alex & Conor for their inspiration).
If by 2021 I am making ten times as 97% of the readers of this blog combined, don’t tell me I didn’t warn you well in advance!
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