If you haven’t participated in one of these AMAs (“ask me anything”) on Reddit, it’s a great way to ask questions to amazing people doing amazing things. Eric Lander, who is offering a course through MITx, 7.00x Introduction to Biology: “The Secret of Life”, and has also contributed courses including 7.01SC Fundamentals of Biology to OCW, answered questions for two hours today during his Reddit AMA session.
Here’s an excerpt where he describes his motivation for doing the MITx course:
I’m doing the edX course for two reasons: (1) to share the course with lots more people and (2) to completely rethink the course — especially how we can use technology to do a much better job of teaching it in the classroom.
While I love giving the lectures, we need more PROJECTS, where students can explore data on their own. We’re going to use the edX course as a framework to create such projects — which I hope will hook people (at MIT and everyone) on biology.
