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MOOCs on Coursera

• Miracles of Human Language: An Introduction to Linguistics, by Marc van Oostendorp, Leiden University
  Rating: ✍ ✍ ✍ ✍ ✍ 
• Global Sustainable Energy: Past, Present and Future, by Wendell Porter, University of Florida
  Rating: ✍ ✍ ✍ ✍ ✍ 
• Introduction to Finance, by Gautam Kaul, University of Michigan
  Rating: ✍ ✍ ✍ ✍ ✍ 
• Crafting an Effective Writer: Tools of the Trade, by Lorrie Ross, Lawrence Barkley, and Ted Blake, Mt. San Jacinto College
  Rating: ✍ ✍ ✍ ✍ ✍ 

MOOCs on OpenEdX

• SciWrite Writing in the Sciences, by Kristin Sainani, Stanford University
  Rating: ✍ ✍ ✍ ✍ ✍ 

MOOCs on the VLC

• Linguistics 101: Fundamendals, Linguistics 102: Speech Science, by Jürgen Handke, Universität Marburg
  Rating: ✍ ✍ ✍ ✍ ✍ 

If you have an older version of Wordfast lying around, but are sent a link to a new gltm (global TM), you likely found out that the format of the link is invalid in the older Wordfast version. The gltm link format is as follows:
gltm://username:password@url:portnumber/

You can easily render this link such that it’s compatible with an older Wordfast version, which has the following format:
wf://username:password@url:portnumber/
In other words, just replace the gltm by wf and you’re all set.

In the following, I will briefly review the course “Global Sustainable Energy: Past, Present and Future” by Prof. Wendell Porter of the University of Florida on Coursera.

Synopsis

The course covered a variety of topics, whereby 3 of the topics, residential energy, renewable energy sources, and transportation were covered more in-depth by the students themselves in peer assessments/papers, which were then graded (anonymously) by other students.

Course format

The course included videos, short and to the point, quizzes, and mandatory discussions in the forums, where the topics were covered first, with the peer assessments following up in-depth. Prof. Porter used the online medium very wisely through the mix of videos that were partly shot at various outdoors locations and especially the 3 longer peer assessments that where then graded by other students.

Rating          ✍ ✍ ✍ ✍ ✍ 

I definitely learned a lot, particularly while researching for the projects/peer assessments and while grading other students’ projects. I could have done without some of the mandatory discussions, simple because more often than not people posted random statements without references or links just to get credit. Nevertheless, the rest of the course far outweighed this slight drawback. Overall, I can definitely recommend this course.

In the following I will briefly review the MOOC (massive open online course) “Introduction to Finance” on Coursera by Prof. Gautam Kaul.

Synopsis

The course covered a variety of topics in a whirlwind, from mortgage calculations over a brief intro to accounting to stocks and bonds. Of course, none of these topics could be covered in-depth in the short amount of time, but it was just the right amount for a small business owner or for anybody with a retirement account and interest in purchasing a home.

Course format

While the format was very “traditional” (for an online course), video lectures with online assignments, Prof. Kaul’s ability to be highly engaging in a video with a bland background is simply amazing. Prof. Kaul is one of the best lecturers I’ve ever heard. The assignments were just the right difficulty and not purely academic, partly tricky, and forced you to actually learn the material and be able to apply what you have learned.

Rating          ✍ ✍ ✍ ✍ ✍ 

I highly recommend this course for anybody as an entry level course into personal and business finances and rate it as a 5 out of 5.

I have previously reviewed some MOOC courses on Coursera and voiced my general opinion about MOOCs (massive open online courses). Below I’d like to review two more courses I have recently completed, both on the topic of writing: Crafting an Effective Writer: Tools of the Trade on Coursera and SciWrite Writing in the Sciences on the Stanford OpenEdX platform. I believe that both will be offered again in the future.

Crafting an Effective Writer: Tools of the Trade

This course is offered on the tried and tested Coursera platform by Lorrie Ross, Lawrence (Larry) Barkley, and Ted Blake of Mt. San Jacinto College. The course info describes this course as suited for high school and college students as well as for people whose native language is not English, i.e. as more of an entry-level course. I have found this course to be indeed quite basic, and I would say that it definitely is below college-level. Nevertheless, I followed the course until the end, since the time commitment was fairly minimal compared to other MOOCs I have taken.

Overall, the course is well structured and the workload just right for taking the course on the side to one’s regular schoolwork or occupation. However, in my opinion, the content focuses too much on theoretical grammatical constructs. I don’t think the flow of my writing will improve if I know that a clause is a nonrestrictive subordinate clause and that a particular sentence is of the type compound-complex. The actual writing assignments were few and far in between. However, the peer assessment and grading process was smooth and fair. The course mainly discussed the grammatical structure of sentences and attempted to put these structures into a broader context in the (too) short writing assignments. The grade was calculated from a number of fairly easy multiple-choice quizzes and the peer writing assignments.

In summary, this course is probably helpful for people whose native language is not English, who are still learning the basics of grammar, or for high school students with a grammar-obsessed teacher. But I don’t think it does much to improve one’s writing style because the course focuses too much on theoretical constructs instead of practical application.

SciWrite Writing in the Sciences

This course is offered by Prof. Kristin Sainani on Stanford’s OpenEdX platform which still seems to have a few technical bugs that need to be ironed out, at least compared to Coursera. This course is much more advanced than the course above and geared towards academics at the graduate level. Although the examples are mostly taken from Dr. Sainani’s field of expertise, medicine, the course is suited for writers and editors (and translators) in all scientific fields. I found the course extremely useful and thorough and was looking forward to the videos each week. A minor drawback was Dr. Sainani’s often very quick speech pattern which could pose a problem in terms of understanding for non-native speakers.

The course thoroughly covered everything from good writing style over proper editing and writing procedure and the structure of publications to the publication submission process and plagiarism. The videos contained a lot of examples. If anything, there were too many editing examples, which one can however skip over. There were 3 essay assignments on practical topics, which were graded by peers. The 3 essays comprised 50% of the final grade, the remainder of the grade was calculated from multiple-choice quizzes, free-form online homework assignments, and a fairly easy multiple-choice final exam.

My main criticism is the peer grading process, which a) still suffered from technical issues of the OpenEdX platform and b) did not provide enough incentive for peers to grade fairly and thoroughly. Since the purpose of the entire course is to improve one’s writing, this peer feedback is quite important. However, more often than not I received seemingly random grades by my peers on all my essays. The marks were all over the place, and no additional comment or reason was given. Since the essays could be resubmitted twice, that feedback would have been essential for me to improve the first attempt. But because the feedback was missing and the marks in the various categories often varied from 0 to the maximum number of points, it was hard for me to determine the specific problems with my writing. I think that an additional mandatory comment field like that on the Coursera platform would greatly help here.

Another minor issue is the layout of the discussion forums. The main topics are not clearly separated, and technical issues are mixed with topical posts or even editing exercises. This is however an issue of the platform, not of the course structure.

Overall, I found this course extremely useful, although the usefulness could be even more improved if the structure of the peer review process could somehow force peers to give more feedback. In any case, I wish that some of the people whose papers I had to read and/or review during my scientific career had taken this course before they started writing their first sentence.

In a previous post, I explained various schemes to scam people out of their money. The best protection against any of these schemes is to verify that you are really dealing with who you think you are.

There are two types of scammers:

• Scammers, who don’t try too hard, on the assumption that they’ll eventually find a victim who is gullible enough. These sort of scams are fairly easy to spot, as I’ll explain below.
• Impostors, who impersonate a reputable person, such that people who actually check the names of the people they are dealing with are fooled into thinking they are doing business with the real person, whereas all their exchanges and transactions happen with the impostor. These types of scam are much harder to uncover.

Impostors and Scammers – Typical Red Flags

Note that the presence of any one of these warning signs alone doesn’t mean that you’re dealing with a dishonest person. All these signs combined with a few online checks that I’ll explain below, however, strongly point to a scam attempt.

Your alarm bells should ring if you receive an inquiry that contains the following:

• The email was sent from a free account such as gmail, yahoo, etc.
  While this is not necessarily in itself an indication that the request is a scam/spam-email, it’s a strong indication in combination with the other signs below. I have, in fact, several good direct clients that write via gmail, but I know them from other sources, therefore I know that they are legitimate. Most of my other clients, however, write via their corporate accounts.

• A proper salutation is missing and the email is sent to my email-address via bcc.
  This points to the fact that this is a mass scam attempt.

• The request is written in really, really bad English, despite the fact that the sender claims to have a source text in English and claims to have a name indicative of a native English speaker.
• The request does not contain any contact information aside from a generic email address and possibly a phone number in a strange country.
  This is in general a strong indicator that the email is a scam/phishing attempt. Everybody has an address and phone number and most people have a website these days. A name such as “Maria Brown”, which is essentially un-Googleable because it’s too generic, immediately raises red flags. If somebody really wants a translation, even if they’ve never bought a translation before, they give a name and address and possibly other contact information so that the provider can contact the translation buyer with the quote. A name and address can also be used to search for that buyer online and verify his/her existence, as I’ll explain below.

But what if you receive a serious inquiry, from a person/company whom you searched for and found online, with apparently proper contact information?

You should still check out the potential client more thoroughly. For one, they could impersonate somebody else, or for another, they could be one of those black sheep on the translation market who never pay (and get away with it!).

Verifying IP-Adresses and Internet Domains

Typically, impostors proceed as follows:

• They steal a reputable person’s credentials. In this post I explain how to safeguard yourself against this.
• They modify the contact details to display their own contact information, possibly with a fake name.
• If they are smart, they use an email address and possibly a domain name that very closely resembles the original address and domain.
  I myself fell victim to this once, when I got contacted by somebody purporting to be a project manager of a reputable agency. I checked out the agency and did my research, but what I did not notice was that the inquiry was sent from an email address ending in .net instead of the agency’s .com. That is, the email came from projectmanager@translationagency.net instead of projectmanager@translationagency.com. Of course, when I checked out the agency, their website was at http://www.translationagency.com. The scammers had simply temporarily bought the domain name translationagency.net, since domain names are fairly cheap these days.


How can you check whether an email/inquiry is legit if scammers buy domain names left and right?

You can check the domain name via Whois, and you can check the IP-address the inquiry was sent from. This is done as follows:

1. Visit http://centralops.net/co/DomainDossier.aspx
2. Type the domain name into the search box, and check the options “domain whois record” and “network whois record”. The rest of the options may be a bit confusing, unless you’re an internet wiz. But then you wouldn’t be reading this part of the post, would you?
3. The Domain Whois Record tells you who registered the domain and who is its administrator, along with their address and telephone number. This is important if you receive an inquiry from somebody supposedly from the US, but in reality they’re actually sitting someplace else.
4. The Network Whois Record tells you the IP-address range of that domain. Every computer on the web has an IP-address, uniquely identifying the computer’s location and the computer itself (just like a phone number). It consists of 4 numbers separated by 3 dots, e.g. 123.4.56.789 (Of course, this is not a real IP-address, because it’s out of range, but this is the format). This is important because you can check whether the email that was sent really came from this domain, as I’ll explain in the next step. This is optional, because it does not always provide more information. The Domain record should already give you lots of information.
5. If you don’t want to check the email IP-address, skip the next 2 steps. Otherwise, go to your email program or webmail and display the header information. Here’s a good list compiled by Google explaining for various email/webmail programs how to display the header. When you have displayed the header, do not panic. Instead, read on.
6. You can safely ignore everything except the lines that start with Received:. These lines represent a list of all the servers/computers through which the message traveled on its way to you. The top “Received”-line is your own system. The last “Received:”-line at the bottom is the computer where the message was sent from. You want to check this one again at http://centralops.net/co/DomainDossier.aspx (yes, the search box also works with IP-addresses). Of course, this may or may not correspond to the information you obtained from the domain name, because in this day and age, some people reroute their emails through other interfaces.

You should now have a pretty good idea who contacted you and from where. Armed with this information you can do further research, see below, if the contact is a translation agency.

Doing Business with Agencies – Payment Practices

Anybody with a computer and internet access can open a translation agency today, from anywhere in the world. While there are many very reputable agencies out there, there are also any number of fly-by-night “agencies” who are only looking to make a quick buck at the expense of translators and end clients.

Therefore, if you are a translator and are doing business with agencies, it pays to become a member of various online forums that discuss payment practices or to subscribe to databases that list the payment practices of various agencies. Here’s a list of forums and databases I consult regularly:

• The Payment Practices database (fee-based)
• ProZ Blue Board (overview is free, details are fee-based)
• Zahlungspraxis Yahoo group (free, very active, mostly for German-speaking countries/translators)
• WPPF Yahoo group (free, medium level of activity)
• Translationagencypayment Yahoo group (free, low level of activity)
• Translation agencies business practices LinkedIn group (free, medium level of activity)
• Unacceptable Translation Rates Naming & Shaming LinkedIn group (free, low level of activity)

These are just a few among many, and your mileage may vary. I personally rely most on the Payment Practices database and found the Zahlungspraxis Yahoo group quite useful.