I have been posting over the last week or so about possible study options for various topics in my retirement. Lifelong learning, and all that. One area that I would be interested in is astronomy, although I have some challenges figuring out exactly what form that study would take.

Formal Canadian degrees

I used a few index tools to look for astronomy or astrophysics programs, and I found about 15 or so options in Canada. I don’t need the degree, so I could take it from anywhere, but the prices frequently go up when you cross borders to be an international student.

None of the options in Canada are particularly great for online completion or even my situation.

Ontario Tech University (Oshawa) has four variations of Bachelor of Science degrees (AP, physics) or Bachelor of Science and Management (AP, physics). Queen’s (Kingston), Western (London), York (Toronto), St. Mary’s (Halifax), Waterloo (Waterloo), University of Calgary, and University of Alberta (Edmonton) all have Bachelor degree options. Waterloo throws in a minor, Western offers a specialization. All of them are generally four-year degree programs, standard science programs and curricula. I could probably do a series of AP / astronomy-only courses, skip the electives and other courses, as a mature student or something. But I’d have to do the application process, share my high-school transcripts and diploma and they wouldn’t care that I did an undergrad or grad degree because neither were in science.

Which is also the problem with two master’s programs — Queen’s and Waterloo (or the Ph.D. @ Queen’s). I have a friend who did an Medical degree at age 40 at one of two universities in Canada that have med degrees that don’t require a science undergrad to get in (Western and Calgary, she went to Calgary). Neither the Queen’s or Waterloo programs let you in without a science undergrad. Preferably with some solid algebra and calculus at the university level. My 99% in high school calculus was enough to bypass calculus at Trent for econometrics, but probably wouldn’t be that useful 40y after exiting high school.

So not online, four years in total, AND I’d have to figure out a way to take courses without all the extra science-y and math-y stuff.

Not much of an option.

Coursera has entered the chat

I took two courses previously through Coursera, including one on meta-literacy and one on video games from a cultural studies perspective. The meta-literacy was alright for the time; the video game one was remarkably substantive (I thought it would be a bird course, but it had some decent academic lifting going on).

Since then, Coursera seem to have altered its model a bit more, or at least the money and credentials side seems to have shifted. There are fewer full-credentialed programs than I remembered, as I thought there were more diplomas and stuff available, particularly for computer programming and such. I also thought there was a couple of science programs available, although I didn’t remember exactly how the “Coursera-hosted courses that are cross-listed with full universities” model worked. The video game course was offered by the University of Alberta for full credit if you wanted to go that route. I didn’t at the time. Now, I wanted to know what was available.

Basically, there are about 128 astronomy courses available in Coursera in English. At least, that’s what the search engine on Coursera itself says. Unfortunately, if I search for astrophysics, I get a slightly different total AND some of the courses are supposedly in English but as I scan through, some are either in another language (like Italian) but with AI generated dubbing (pass) or they’re in another language with subtitles (also pass). If I use the astronomy search results only, it tells me there are:

• 47 beginner classes;
• 36 intermediate classes;
• 18 advanced classes; and,
• 26 mixed-level classes.

With 49 different educational partners in total, of which 36 have either only 1 or 2 classes offered. For recognizable names, CALTech offers 2, Yale 5, Rice 13, and, drum roll please, the University of Colorado at Boulder has a whopping 27 classes. WTF? Here’s their list:

I confess that the group of courses is NOT what I was expecting…three courses on journalism, politics and the nature of the space race? Two general-interest / introductory courses on the universe are “normal”, I expected those. I did NOT expect 4 courses on optical design elements (presumably linked to telescope mirror quality) nor 14 on spacecraft design and operations.

Sooo, that’s not the right route. I went back to the original list, exported the list of courses to Excel, ran some reconfigs on the data to put it in a table, and voila — 128 entries of which 4 are fully free, 59 have a free trial, 64 have a “preview option”, and 1 is just simply “new”. The time durations and levels are a bit more granular:

• Beginner: basic course of 1-4 weeks = 14 courses, moderate investment of 1-3 months = 32 courses, and serious commitment of 3-6 months = 2 courses;
• Intermediate: basic course of 1-4 weeks = 15 courses, moderate investment of 1-3 months = 18 courses, and serious commitmetn of 3-6 months = 3 courses;
• Advanced: basic course of 1-4 weeks = 9 courses, moderate investment of 1-3 months = 8 courses, and serious commitment of 3-6 months = 2 courses;
• Mixed: basic course of 1-4 weeks = 1 course, moderate investment of 1-3 months = 23 courses, and serious commitment of 3-6 months = 1 course.

Of course, obviously, I wouldn’t be taking them all. I just wanted to do a deeper dive to know if it was a viable option. Most degrees are 10-12 courses across a spectrum, and while I’ll have to figure out which ones are basically variations of the same course, I think there are a few that are pretty good starter ones for me to consider.

So, about that cost thing

There are four “free” classes, including Astro 101: Black Holes (University of Alberta), Space Medicine (Duke University, Statistical Mechanics: Algorithms and Computations (École normale supérieure), and Imagining Other Earths (Princeton). The first and last ones could be interesting.

The rest? The new, or at least current, Coursera cost structure is very different from what I expected. As I mentioned earlier, I noticed fewer degree programs, and previously, I was only looking for free courses to audit or pseudo-audit. However, I basically have three ways to consider the classes, and none of them would seem amenable to anything to do with an educational allowance under WFA from work.

Option 1 is to pay per course — most are about $70 each. Some keep the costs down by marking things with AI, which makes me a bit leery. I was also surprised to see some courses showing up as being in English but actually in a language like Italian with AI-driven dubbing. Nope. But $70 is generally okay as a start. The ones with free trials or previews have decent “look inside” options to see what the course looks like, type of modules, etc.

Option 2 is to pay per month — somewhere around $80 or so Canadian, but as an “all you can eat” buffet of courses. Of course, the limit for yourself is more one of time and availability. I’d love to start courses immediately but I wouldn’t have the time yet.

Option 3 is actually better if I were fully retired. If you pay for the year, the price drops to about $560, or about $48 per month (instead of $70 or $ 83). That’s not bad — a year’s tuition for 3-4 classes compared to $280 doing them individually doesn’t look as good, but if I were to do 3-4 at the same time or a series of ones that are 1-4 weeks, I could crank out a few and come out ahead. Basically, if all the classes were only $70 each, I’d need to do 8 in a year to come out ahead. Although some of the classes are NOT only $70…technically they START at $70, but some go as high as $120 or $130. I think I’ll be tempted to try a couple of the ones I want for sure, and then figure out afterwards how many I might want to / can do at a time.

Soooo, I have a list of 128 courses that are nominally “astronomy or astrophysics” related, and I might pick 10-20. Or I could go a different route.

The Great Courses

I also wanted to see what I remembered from the offerings on the program, “The Great Courses”. I’ve done part of a psychology class with them, as well as some photography work. And when I run “astronomy” through their list of offerings, I get 30 courses. But they are not the “same” type of list as that of Coursera. Although maybe it isn’t quite as simple as that.

For the list of 30 courses at The Great Courses, there are ten that are pure astronomy:

1. Understanding the Universe: An Introduction to Astronomy, 2nd Edition 
2. My Favourite Universe 
3. Introduction to Astrophysics 
4. Life in Our Universe 
5. Black Holes Explained 
6. The Life and Death of Stars 
7. Dark Matter, Dark Energy: The Dark Side of the Universe 
8. Experiencing Hubble: Exploring the Milky Way 
9. Experiencing Hubble: Understanding the Greatest Images of the Universe 
10. What Can the James Webb Telescope See? 

Four general intro classes, some stuff on black holes and stars, a bit on dark matter, and then moving into astrophotography and imaging of the big space telescopes. Not quite enough rigour for me on the formation and structures, but it’s a start.

The interesting thing is that they have 14 “history” courses that include some bits of history “of” and “with” astronomy:

• The Remarkable Science of Ancient Astronomy 
• Great Heroes and Discoveries of Astronomy 
• The Birth of the Modern Mind: The Intellectual History of the 17th and 18th Centuries 
• The Olmecs: Mesoamerica’s Mysterious First Civilization 
• The Queen of the Sciences: A History of Mathematics 
• The History and Achievements of the Islamic Golden Age 
• Secrets of the Occult 
• The Middle Ages around the World 
• Maya to Aztec: Ancient Mesoamerica Revealed 
• Conquest of the Americas 
• Greece, Rome, and the Birth of Western Philosophy 
• Introduction to Greek Philosophy 
• The Other 1492: Ferdinand, Isabella, and the Making of an Empire 
• The Greek World: A Study of History and Culture 

And then there are six other classes that I pegged as “science”:

• Radio Astronomy: Observing the Invisible Universe 
• The Joy of Science 
• Great Ideas of Classical Physics 
• Chaos 
• Einstein’s Legacy: Modern Physics All around You 
• Change and Motion: Calculus Made Clear, 2nd Edition 

Now, what did I mean by “Coursera doesn’t have the same courses”? They do have the introductory astronomy classes. And I’m sure they have courses on ancient history, including Greece and the Roman Empire. But Coursera doesn’t consider any of those history or mythology courses to have anything to do with astronomy. But the material absolutely does, of course, as the growth of various nations around the world developed science and philosophy together, often intermingled with religion and politics as well. All were trying to answer the fundamental questions about the nature of our existence in relation to the broader universe.

Once I retire, I’ll have to narrow the options further, but at least I have a good starting point. Which, I realize, is what I’m doing right now…trying to figure out some of the options. I’m seeing which ones are viable so that if/when I have to make a decision, it will be clear what the options are to consider. I’ve even ruled a few things out as I went, which is huge. Enough to get my brain around it at least.

A couple more areas to look at…