Brain Science Podcast discussion

List of neurology/neuroscience related courses starting now or soon on Coursera:


Drugs and the Brain Henry A Lester - Caltech 01/04 7 weeks
Medical Neuroscience Leonard E White - Duke University 01/06 12 weeks
Computational Neuroscience Rajesh P. N. Rao & Adrienne Fairhall - Washington University 01/10 8 weeks
Clinical Neurology Daniel Lowenstein, MD - UCSF 02/10 6 weeks
Statistical Analysis of FMRI Data Martin Lindquist - Johns Hopkins University 02/24 6 weeks


I have taken the first 2 and they are excellent courses. They are free and available to anyone. I am taking them again for the updated content and I am looking forward to the other 3. There are a several others on EdX and other MOOC platforms but for some reason I prefer Coursera's platform over the rest.

Excellent, Iva. Thank you for sharing this.

Oh I resolved to take one of these free classes in the new year... this is right up my alley. But 20 hours per week is scaring me off... surely an overstatement. If I'd spent 20 hrs per week on each of my classes in school, I would have been working on them 120 hours a week!

Thanks very much for posting! I signed up for the medical neuroscience class, which I was going to rearrange my entire next two semesters to take at school. Some of these courses look really great. It appears that you can download everything too if you don't have time to view the materials now and aren't interested in earning a grade/credit.

Another one was announced to start on Apr 21st from University of Chicago https://www.coursera.org/course/neurobio covering the same topics as Medical Neuroscience by Duke but based on the description it looks like it might be just a little bit less rigorous.

Jess I agree, its worth to even just download the videos if you don't have time to actually do the courses real time. Especially for medical professionals, Medical Neuroscience is an awesome course. Someone in the forum wrote the other day that taking the class allowed her to recognize a tumor and a stroke in progress in a patient at the ophthalmologists office where she works. That is simply incredible!

if you sign up do you have to be on at specific times?

Different courses have different rules. The videos with the lectures are usually released once a week and once released are available until the end of the course. Each week's theme most often has a quiz associated with it that must be completed by a certain date (most of the time you have about one week to complete the quiz). So you don't actually need to be logged on at specific times during the week but there is some kind of a deadline by which you need to complete the work if you want to get credit. (I like this aspect, it stops me from procrastinating :) ) At the end most courses issue a certificate of completion to students that satisfy some criteria (most of the time you would get a certificate if you got scores higher than 70% and some of the courses offer certificates of distinction when your score is higher than 85% or 90%)

Hi Iva! Good to see you on here! I have taken the Medical Neuroscience course as well. It is AMAZING! It definitely helped me gain the knowledge to be an attractive candidate in grad school. (I was just accepted into 3 programs!). I am also currently taking the Statistical Analysis of fMRI Data which is also really great.