This summer, I enrolled in the edX MOOC Sustainable Building Design. Overall it was a good experience and I learned a lot.
I was initially interested in the topic because my day job is related to sustainable building technology. I was slowly being exposed to concepts and jargon (LEED, energy usage intensity, "the built environment") that were interesting, but left me wanting more context and a more holistic knowledge of the field. I can't remember exactly how I stumbled on this specific MOOC, but it seemed appropriate and so I started watching the first few lectures. It happened that a new verified round was starting right around the same time, so I decided to really commit and pay the ~$70 to get graded assignments and a certificate at the end.
The course is taught in the architecture department at MIT. It is two tracked and the first track at least is completely doable without any prerequisite knowledge. The main difference between the tracks is that the higher track uses non-free software (mostly Rhino and Climate Studio), whereas the other uses free (as in beer) tools. A side effect is that the free tools are simpler, and so even though there are lengthy trials available for the paid software, after I experimented with both I stuck with the lower track for most of the course.
The course was lengthy (~13 weeks), but the overall commitment was fairly light. 3 weeks of content were made available at a time and each week contained one or two lectures that were about an hour long each, quiz questions during the lectures, as well as an assignment usually. The final few weeks were set aside for a final project. I don't think I spent more than 3 hours a week on the course, except for working on the final project in the last week. The lectures were all given by Professor Christoph Reinhart who I found to be engaging and knowledgeable. I ended up buying his book.
The assignments were very easy. I finished with a 97%, with modest effort. The hardest part was just setting aside the time to watch the lectures, pay attention, and then work on the assignment each week. Once started, the assignment itself was always straightforward. I don't think this is a bad thing. Having to complete any kind of assignment, even if all it requires is a direct translation of the content of the lecture, makes the knowledge stick in my head a lot more. If the assignments were significantly harder I might have lost interest or got discouraged, but maybe had they been a bit harder I would have ended up with a grade that more closely reflects what I felt I put into the course (97% does not).
The final project was a more open-ended design task that involved applying the knowledge from all the previous works. A very detailed marking rubric was provided (the projects were peer-graded), and so while the assignment was flexible in how much effort one wanted to put in, it was easy to complete it according to the rubric without too much effort.
I made the notes I took during the course available here, but here's some of the most memorable things I took away:
And some "fun facts" about buildings that I can now whip out:
Probably the coolest thing I took away from this course was being able to perform basic shading studies. A family member working on a construction project serendipitously asked if I could calculate how much light would enter a ground floor room shaded by an upper deck. With the knowledge from the course and some measurements from the building I was able to build a quick model in SketchUp and use Andrew Marsh's 3D Sun Path Tool to provide some pretty accurate information. Cool.