Coursera Blog

Instagram, the popular photo-sharing app, exploded onto the scene in 2011, reaching 10M users in less than a year. Why is it so popular? Observers point to many things, but all agree that it was thoughtfully designed and masterfully crafted. Good design is becoming increasingly more important for many products and services today.

Good design thinking in this day and age marries together the rich findings from cognitive science with artistic creativity, and design has become a combination of art + science. An example of the artistic element is in looking for hidden needs through close observation. Prof. Scott Klemmer calls this process “need-finding” and gives an example:

Prof. Klemmer will cover both the art and science aspects in his six-course Specialization on Interaction Design. The Specialization is geared towards those who want to be designers or product managers, and covers many of the key elements in the design process, including working with design briefs, determining user needs, and developing and testing prototypes. Upon completion of the courses, students can take the Capstone project, which was designed in partnership with–you guessed it–Instagram!

Read the full version of this article on Class Central’s blog.

Mitch Prinstein is a psychology professor in UNC-Chapel Hill’s Clinical Program and the instructor for the new course, Psychology of Popularity, on Coursera. His research uses a developmental psychopathology framework to understand how adolescents’ interpersonal experiences are associated with depression, self-injury, and health risk behaviors. His new popularity course presents research on the impact of early life experiences with popularity; how those experiences influence adult lives; and how an understanding of popularity can promote increased success at work, better parenting skills, and greater fulfillment in life.

Why is popularity valuable to study on a psychological level?

Our brains are programmed to care deeply about our social standing and our relationships. Popularity even changes our DNA! Not surprisingly, what happens with our social relationships in childhood and adolescence predicts a wide range of lifetime outcomes.

Many people think of popularity in terms of high school, but it goes beyond adolescence. How is the study of popularity helpful for both kids and adults?

We don’t always realize it, but our popularity in childhood has programmed our adult brain in ways that affect us every single day. We did not leave popularity behind in high school – it has affected who we are deeply, which is probably why so many contexts now still echo the same popularity dynamics. Whether it has to do with our personal relationships, office politics, our obsession with celebrities, or even how we are raising our children, popularity is still a factor we deal with today as adults.

What do you hope students will get out of your new Psychology of Popularity MOOC?

I hope adults can see their childhoods in a new light. I hope parents learn how to help their children grow up in a new world where popularity reigns more strongly than ever. And I hope that as adults, we can recognize patterns related to popularity dynamics at home, at work, and in our communities that can be changed so we don’t keep reliving our adolescence all over again.

“I’m not a math person”. “I’m not great with numbers”. “I hate math”. These sentiments are commonly heard, and many people struggled with math during school (which may explain why the U.S. in the latest international PISA exams, ranked 27th out of 34 OECD countries). But how many students have been lucky enough to have a math teacher that is as passionate about teaching it as Prof. Jim Fowler, in the Department of Mathematics at Ohio State University?

Prof. Fowler’s goal is to transform peoples’ attitude about mathematics: “I really just want people to like math more.” He acknowledges that math can be difficult and requires practice. But it doesn’t have to be the drudgery that many people have experienced:

For a lot of people, their experience in math class has been so focused on drill problems and calculations. They didn’t even think about some of the ideas. Many people could actually do really well in terms of the calculus content, but they’re struggling a lot with the algebraic manipulations, which is primarily what we’re evaluating them on. But there are ways to get people to get attached to the calculus concept first and get them excited. A lot of math is about talking about ideas, evaluating those ideas, and discussing them.

Thus, doing math can also be a social activity. Prof. Fowler describes this aspect in the video clip below:

Read the full version of this article on Class Central’s blog. You too can learn calculus by signing up for Calculus One at any time.

Prof. Raghunathan studies the science of happiness and is a visiting faculty member at the Indian School of Business and writes a blog column for Psychology Today. He notes that while we all want to achieve happiness, we often pursue other things that don’t lead to it. He also notes the ‘Three Pillars of Happiness’ we should focus on:

• Pursue meaningful work – Try to spend your energy in ways that are meaningful to you, at work or at home. From a career standpoint, Raghunathan recommends making passion a criterion for choosing your work: “you spend so much time at work you might as well make that a meaningful thing that you are doing in your life”. Perhaps this is not feasible for everyone at every point in their career, but it is surely a sound guiding principle, as it has been echoed by Steve Jobs, Thoreau, Gloria Estefan, and others.
• Maintain close relationships – Most people consider the relationships they have developed with family, friends, colleagues, and others to be the most meaningful part of their lives. Relationships are investments that require time and attention, yet we are quick to downplay or dismiss them. Social science offers practical suggestions for improving relationships, such as: giving your brain a cooling off period when you are angry, seeing forgiveness as an integral part of freeing up your own mind, and cultivating face-to-face time in our mobile connected world.
• Have a spiritual attitude – A strong sense of spirituality, whether religiously or otherwise based, has been associated with reduced stress levels, and we know we cannot be happy when we are over-stressed. There is also growing evidence that meditation practices have beneficial effects. In the MOOC, Prof. Raghunathan will have a couple of experts leading participants through the steps of the meditation process.

Read the full version of this article on Class Central’s blog.

President Obama recently announced a Precision Medicine Initiative, initially funded with $215 million in 2016, to understand the fundamental characteristics that make us unique and to explore how we can use that information to reduce risk, target therapies, and improve health. One of the cornerstones of this initiative is understanding how our individual genomes are related to disease, health risks and response to treatments. The White House has hired a Chief Data Scientist, DJ Patil, to help spearhead this effort.

Why on earth would a data scientist help lead an effort in precision medicine with genomics?

The answer is that the majority of precision medicine will involve what we call “genomic data science”. To gather information on people’s genomes we need to measure variations in DNA from person to person, usually by sequencing their DNA. Huge innovations in this technology have made DNA sequencing incredibly cheap–500,000 times cheaper than it was when the human genome was first sequenced in 2001. The challenge is no longer acquiring your genome; today the challenge is interpreting and understanding how your genome affects your health. This is a data science question. It requires computing to process piles of data, statistics to discover relationships between your genome and your health, and biology to tie it all together and make sense of those discoveries.

We developed the Johns Hopkins Genomic Data Science Specialization to get you up to speed on the ideas and tools you need to participate in the genomics revolution. In this specialization we will teach you about how sequencing technologies work, how you can use it to measure important biological molecules, and teach you skills to process and analyze this data. We will focus on teaching tools that are freely available, open source, widely recognized for their excellence, and supported by large communities of scientists. These are tools that we and other leading researchers in Genomic Data Science use every day. The goal is to take you from the very basics of genomic data science to learning how to execute and evaluate Genomic Data Science pipelines.

We will teach basic skills required to start analyzing high throughput biology data. The focus is on laying a foundation of skills and helping you learn where to look for information as technologies improve in this rapidly evolving field. Genomic data science is one of the biggest and most important data sciences, and along the way we will also point you to resources that will allow you to take a deeper dive into this new field.

Today we are launching the class “Introduction to Genomic Technologies”. This class is perfect for anyone who is interested in modern biological data. It is designed to be a conceptual course that can be taken by anyone as a general introduction to genomic data science. We think the class will be useful for researchers at all levels, ranging from people just starting out to seasoned researchers. Over the next two months we will be launching the rest of the specialization. These classes will cover using Galaxy, command line tools, the Python language, sequence algorithms, Bioconductor, and statistics. They are designed to be entry level classes but will require some programming experience, and will be easier if you have a background and interest in using computers. We will cover the whole process, from software installation to application and data interpretation. Our instructors are all active researchers in computational biology at Johns Hopkins University from the Departments of Computer Science, Biology, Biostatistics, Medicine and Biomedical Engineering. They are all authors of very widely used software and methods for Genomic Data Science.

This specialization was built by the Johns Hopkins Data Science Lab. This team is also responsible for the Johns Hopkins Data Science Specialization, the most successful massive open online classes (MOOCs) in existence.

Classes can be taken for free, but a fee is required to earn a certificate of completion. We are pleased to announce today a discount from $99 to $49 for all classes in the sequence. There has never been a better time to be a genomic data scientist and we are excited about helping you get started in this rapidly growing field.

Kasper Hansen + Jeff Leek
Co-Directors Johns Hopkins Genomic Data Science Specialization