Welcome to the official blog for the Mechanical MOOC – A Gentle Introduction to Python. This site organizes content related to the course, which is offered on an ongoing basis, with cohorts starting about every five weeks. You can sign up for the next offering at http://mechanicalmooc.org.
The course takes the best of existing open learning sites—content from MIT OpenCourseWare, communities from OpenStudy, exercises by Codecademy—and joins them loosely with a mailing list that coordinates learner activity. Visit our FAQ page for more information
On this blog you’ll find an archive of the e-mails sent to participants in the course, as well as MechMOOC news and discussions. Click on the topic list on the right to view the e-mail sequence archive (our first sequence is Seq15Oct12, the class starting October 15, 2012; our second is Seq26Nov12, the class starting November 26, 2012; our third is Seq7Jan13, starting–you guessed it–January 7, 2013). Also links to news, analysis, tech issues and other topics.
Thanks for joining in the fun!
The Mechanical MOOC - A Gentle Introduction to Python 
What’s the status of Seq7Jan13?
Up and running–are you not getting e-mails?
When does the next sequence (after Seq7Jan13) start?
We’re still looking at schedule for the next one, but late February/early March is best guess at this point.
Who are you? An individual, a group, an institution, a company? I can’t find any hint on this site. Can I trust you?
Peer2Peer University (p2pu.org) and MIT OpenCourseWare (ocw.mit.edu) staff maintain this course.
I want to join, will a new sequence start?
We haven’t set a date yet. We are kinda catching our mechanical breath here, but we’ll get a date set soon!
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Hi Guys,
I am not getting emails
Just mailing the week one assignment now. Are you just looking for that one, or have you not been receiving any of them? If you are not getting them, it’s typically a spam filter issue, but we’ll check to be sure you e-mail is registered with us correctly.
I’m enjoying the Mechanical MOOC introductory Python course, and have just noticed that it will be offered again in Spring, 2014. If given some advance notice regarding the start date, I’d like to recruit others at my workplace who might wish to participate. About how much time prior to week 0 do you expect to announce the schedule?
Thanks, glad to hear you are having fun. We’ve been running the course whenever we’ve enrolled enough learners to ensure we have a good cohort (usually when we hit 2,500). We can try to fix a date based on current enrollments, but we usually give about a month’s notice. Let us do some research.
We’re at 650 right now, so maybe late January to early February before we have enough to run again.