Tag Archives: mit

Online Course Part 2

First two courses of the training finished, and I want to share my experience, feelings and thoughts about the courses. Firstly, in my opinion the most beneficial part of the courses is team project. During the course every week you work on a project. For the first two weeks projects are individual activity, later team works begin. Talking about the questions of the project with other students broaden my perspective. Even instructors mention about different ideas in the video part of the course or there are several approaches to topics in the written parts, it is not possible to ask further questions about their perspective to deeply understand another person’s view. However, while working as a team I can instantly and without any time limitation ask questions to my colleagues about their perspective. Moreover, since I need to support my opinions in team projects I feel more motivated to further elaborate my ideas and express them in an elegant way.

Secondly, I need to tell that during the course I realized one more time that worldwide popular companies are not have perfect processes or design and development techniques. In the courses there are several opportunities to connect with other participants via both polls and forums. I carefully follow the results and topics of these parts and saw that engineers from much known companies have similar problems, challenges and process with me. I believe that the only difference of my company or other companies like it is we has started working on this kind of engineering topics later than them. Since the technology changes rapidly we have chance to adopt new technologies faster and create better products.

Lastly I would like say that, not for specifically systems engineering topic but for in more general case, I feel happy just by learning new staff. Following a course feels me better just like reading a novel or watching a movie or visiting a museum. So, I hope to always learn about anything valuable.

New Online Course

Life long learning is a passion for me. I always feel better when I begin a new learning adventure. After my graduation I continued to seek various learning activities. I did not complete my PhD but I learned a lot from that journey too. In fact I more like face to face education, I have convincing reasons for that but it is not the topic of this post,  but for last five years it is a bit more hard for me to attend classes in a physical building regularly. Therefore, I have started to satisfy my learning desire by online courses. 

Two weeks ago I have just started to pursue a new program called Architecture and Systems Engineering: Models and Methods to Manage Complex Systems on MIT xPro. This is my first paid online course. I would like to thank my company to pay it. I heard the program from one of my friend just a week ago to kick off of the course. In a week I adjusted all paper work for purchase of the program with the help of both Roketsan and MIT staff.

Now, first two weeks of the first course of the program had finished. Courses are not only videos which an instructor explain something, but it is an experience which includes reading some text, watching videos, writing in discussion forums and doing graded and project assignments. I spend about an hour daily for four days in a week. For the first two weeks course content and assignments were not too hard but in next weeks I expect that there will be more complicated topics.

In my profession I am working in a team which designs missile launcher systems for aircrafts and UAVs. Since all aircrafts, missiles and launchers are complicated systems with many subsystems, systems engineering approach is a necessary asset for whom deals with this kind of business. So, my main expectation from the course is improving my abilities about challenging with complex systems. Moreover, I hope to refine my insight about global product development mentality. I will update this post or add a new one after end of the first course of the program.