Hey Everybody,
My name is Matt Sorgenfrei, and I was on GRT #192 in high school and now go to Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo, California. This summer I am working for NASA Ames, and I want to let every Chief Delphi Forum reader know about a really cool opportunity coming up this fall.
Starting September 29, NASA will be offering a three week online course that will be broadcast live from Rio Tinto, Spain. This region of Spain is serving as a test bed for the next robots that NASA will send to Mars in 2009. In conjunction with these tests, NASA is developing a webcast course that will cover the biology and robotics behind this next mission to Mars.
The best part is, you can get college credit by participating. If you sign up to take the class, you can get 1 unit of college credit from San Jose State. All lectures and quizzes will be online, and a final essay must be written.
If you are interested, but don’t want to actually take the class, you can sign up to simply watch the lectures. NASA calls that ‘auditing’ the class.
Any way you cut it, if you have bothered to read this far down this thread, then you might as well just go visit
Since San Jose State is an accredited college, and a member of the CSU school system, you can assume that the college credit you get from San Jose State will be transferable to pretty much any undergraduate program in the country. As of right now, no one here at NASA can think of a school that wouldn’t accept the credit. The only catch is that you have to take the class online through San Jose State.
Will the lectures be available for download after the initial webcasts? Looking at the schedule of lectures, it seems as if a considerable amount of school will be missed in order to watch them at 10am.
At some colleges (at Cornell I know for a fact this is the case), transfer credit is only accepted if there is a similar course offered at the university you are transferring the credit to. So if the college does not have a 1 credit class on the same subject, it is not transferrable. Further, even if it did transfer, the 1 credit course might not do anything for you. It would be the same as taking a 1 credit physical education class. It would show up on your transcript, but in terms of meeting any graduation or degree requirements, would do nothing.
On the other hand, looks like a cool experience. And that’s what you should be doing it for, not the credit.
I am definately interested (and have signed up), but i’d only be able to do it if the webcasts are downloadable and I could watch them at a later date. I already have classes scheduled at 10 am those days.
Just to clarify about seeing the webcasts later on:
We will archive every lesson as it is being taped, in both English and Spanish. Since this is being done in realtime while the lecture is going on, you should be able to access them pretty soon after. There will be an interactive chat window where students can ask questions of the lecturers, and all the traffic in the chat window will be archived as well. Hope that helps.
Matt i was looking all over the website and i cant find an answer to my question, will there be any fees involved with this. I am expecting their to be some, since it is for college credit. I just want to know before hand so i can be expecting a bill if i get one.
~Mike
Because NASA is subsidizing the majority of this course, the cost to you will be $40. That is 20% of what it normally costs to register for a class at San Jose State.
Now would probably be a good time to remind everyone that the class itself will only be 100 students. Everyone else who is interested in acutally getting the credit will be put on a waiting list, and the worse case scenario for them would be that they just get to audit the class.
this is definitely something i’m going to be looking into. worse case scenario it’ll just be something i’ll do for simple interest. thanks for the heads-up. if you just choose to audit the class will it still cost me $40? (i’m a poor college student)
Nope. It doesn’t cost a thing to audit the class. So that means you should run out right now and tell your friends and your mailman and the kids you babysit down the block, cause everyone who wants to can check this out by audititing it for free.