Coming home from a MOOC

Abstract

My ten-week Massive Open Online Course "Statistical Mechanics: Algorithms and Computations", in early 2014, focused on subjects such as Monte Carlo sampling, molecular dynamics, transition phases in hard-sphere liquids, simulated annealing, classical spin models, quantum Monte Carlo algorithms, and Bose-Einstein condensation, etc. It familiarized a huge international crowd of students with cutting-edge subjects in computational physics. Here, I present the topics of the course, its basic design ideas, its scope and challenges, and compare it with earlier attempts in online teaching.Comment: 4 page editorial, based on a talk at the XXVIth IUPAP Conference on Computational Physics, CCP2014 (August 11-14, 2014, Boston, Massachusetts, USA