{"id":5662,"date":"2015-01-27T08:51:32","date_gmt":"2015-01-27T07:51:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.walkingrandomly.com\/?p=5662"},"modified":"2015-01-27T09:26:25","modified_gmt":"2015-01-27T08:26:25","slug":"popular-linear-algebra-mooc-switches-from-ipython-to-matlab","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/?p=5662","title":{"rendered":"Popular Linear Algebra MOOC switches from IPython to MATLAB"},"content":{"rendered":"

Linear Algebra – Foundations to Frontiers<\/a> (or LAFF to its friends) is a popular, high quality and free MOOC<\/a> that, as the title suggests, teaches aspects of linear algebra<\/a>\u00a0in a way that takes the student from the very basics through to some cutting edge techniques. I worked through much of it last year and thoroughly enjoyed the approach it took — focusing on programming aspects from the very beginning. The course authors are also among the developers of the FLAME project<\/a>, a high performance linear algebra library, and one of the interesting aspects of the LAFF course (for me at least) was that it taught linear algebra in a way that also allowed you to understand the approaches used in the algorithms behind FLAME.<\/p>\n

Last year, all of the programming assignments in LAFF were done in Python, making use of the IPython notebook<\/a>. This year, the software stack will be different and will be based on MATLAB<\/a>. I understand that everyone who signs up to LAFF will be able to get a free MATLAB license from Mathworks for the duration of the course<\/strong>. Understandably, this caused quite a bit of discussion between the LAFF team and software\/language geeks like me. In a recent Facebook thread<\/a>, I asked about the switch and received the reply<\/p>\n

‘MATLAB will be free during the course. There are open source equivalents, but Mathworks staff is supporting the use of MATLAB (staff for us). There were some who never got the IPython notebooks to work properly. We are really excited at the opportunity to innovate again and perhaps clear up snags in the programming issues we had. It was complicated to support IPython on all of the operating systems and machines that participants use. MATLAB promises to be easier and will allow us again to concentrate on the Linear Algebra’ – LAFF UTx<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

I’m sufficiently interested in this change from IPython to MATLAB that I’ll be signing up for the course again this year and I encourage you to do the same — I believe that the programming-centric teaching approach taken by LAFF is extremely well done and your time would be well-spent working through the course.<\/p>\n

The course starts on 28th January 2015 so sign up now<\/a>!<\/p>\n

Here’s the trailer for last year’s course.
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