“The dog gets mad when I sit there for hours watching Coursera lectures,” says retired Navy and Air Force Veteran, Jim Whitman.
Whitman’s discipline started early with joining the Navy at a young age. Four initial years of service gave Jim the opportunity to go to UMass where he fell in love with learning. Prompted with a hunger for knowledge, he joined the Air Force and found his way back through an MBA. Now, retired but still teaching as a professor and President of Broward College in Guayaquil Ecuador, Jim credits his military experience in giving him drive and a goal oriented personality to keep acquiring new skills. This is how he came across Coursera.
“Coursera is heaven for an old man,“ says Jim. “I’m addicted to curiosity”. Instead of watching TV, he now spends his free time taking courses on the french revolution or the paradoxes of war. And as a professor at Broward College in Ecuador, he uses Coursera to empower his students and improve his own curriculum. He encourages his over 300+ students daily to take Coursera to really dive into a variety of topics they can potentially be interested in pursuing as careers.
Jim’s goal is to keep taking courses to broaden his interests and to tell students and fellow Veterans of the low cost opportunities on Coursera to build new skills, gain credential value and to help answer the question: “what are you really interested in?”
*Happy Veterans Day – be sure to check out how Coursera is partnering with the VA to offer one free Verified Certificate to millions of US Veterans.