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MOOCs. Screen-side chat. Discussion forums.

These new vocabulary words are starting to roll off my tongue almost as fluently as “gag me with a spoon”, mixer, diag and Rocky Horror Picture Show did when I attended a brick and mortar school several decades back. Somehow though, the focus on studying isn’t coming quite as quickly.

Graduate degree in hand, several careers and several kids along, I have returned to college—well at least to college classes—in the new world of MOOC: Massive Open Online Courses. Returning to class in this new medium I am finding it hard to decipher between what’s different due to the medium (being on-line) and what’s just different about higher education in general from the 1980s.

For one, I am stumped by the term ‘virtual’ that so many people seem to apply to MOOCs. There is very little virtual about the classes I am taking. Real professors using actual videos teach real content to me and other physical classmates. Many of the discussion threads are high caliber, adding new insight and perspectives from around the world along plenty of humor and support when the coursework gets hard. We may not all be sharing the same dining experience or trudging through the same snow drifts or city traffic to school, but we definitely are learning from one another and our professor in a shared experience.

My online courses have come with unexpected perks. I immediately found the benefit of being able to speed up lectures— watching a professor speak at 2x the standard rate was so much more energetic that when I start watching again at a normal rate I feel like the prof was talking through Jell-O. Additionally, there’s no drop/add deadline. Thinking the course work wouldn’t really be all that time-consuming (Ha, was I ever wrong about that!) I signed up for far more courses than I could possibly manage without becoming a full time student again. No problem—I easily and painlessly unenrolled from several. And while the professors don’t have office hours and they kindly request that students refrain from sending them emails, one course I’m taking offers weekly screen-side chats. This week students from Mexico, Canada, China, Peru and the United States all posed questions directly to the profs who, within the constraints of band-width, more or less answered all queries thoroughly.

I have a feeling that the biggest downside will be the limitless menu of class options. So far I’ve started four courses with four very disparate goals. I doubt I’ll be able to complete all four and still maintain a reasonable life balance. I look forward to seeing how my experiment works out. How are your on-line courses working for you or how well you are working in them? And if you haven’t tried one yet, there are many options. I’m taking my courses all from Coursera as I find it easier to get to know and work within a common interface. Scroll through the options today. The courses are a lot like potato chips—bet you can’t select just one.