[Question] What are some good online courses relevant to EA?

[EdoArad🔸]

I’m familiar with Peter Singer’s Effective Altruism Course on Coursera and this microdegree by MIT on Development Economics which contains several courses.

What other free online courses would you recommend?

[MichaelA🔸]

Apparently, this year, Charity Entrepreneurship will be making the first half of their program freely available online:

This course focuses on the main reason many charities fail to have an impact. As making better decisions is helpful to almost all charity founders (as well as for a wide range of other roles), we have worked to make this program publicly available as an audit program. It will be open over the summer. Subsequently, we will evaluate if it should stay up long term.

[Jamie_Harris]

The Good Food Institute have a short online course relevant to animal-free food technology. It’s not very detailed, but I understand that they are working on adding to it so that it becomes a more thorough walk-through of the issues and technical knowledge.

Additionally, Animal Advocacy Careers is a new nonprofit focusing on addressing career and talent bottlenecks in the effective animal advocacy community. One intervention that we’re planning to trial this year is running an online course and workshop focusing on integrating 1) effective animal advocacy research and 2) 80k and EA career considerations into career decision-making. People can express interest in participating in that programme here.

[jared_m]

Per Michael’s suggestion here, here are links to several free and reputable:

• Management talks and training resources

• Operations training resources

• Online courses in accounting, finance, asset valuation, and investment philosophy (perhaps valuable to operations staff or aspiring impact investors) from NYU Stern’s Aswath Damodaran at his personal faculty page here

For those interested in more-generic professional skills along with EA content/​skills courses.

[MichaelA🔸]

80,000 Hours’ Guide to working in AI policy and strategy recommended these two MOOCs:

• https://​​www.udacity.com/​​course/​​intro-to-artificial-intelligence—cs271

• https://​​www.coursera.org/​​learn/​​machine-learning

The first is free, and I believe the second is too. I did the first, and found it useful.

I also found Game Theory with Ben Polak from Yale useful and surprisingly engaging. But note that that’s just lectures, rather than a full “online course”.

A similar role might also be served by some of these sources of EA-related videos (though again, most aren’t “courses”).

[Tessa A 🔸]

Some biosecurity-related content:

• Next Generation Biosecurity: Responding to 21st Century Biorisks Useful broad six-week introduction to biosecurity issues, including lots of case studies. Put together by experts at the University of Bath, including the folks behind biosecu.re.

• Act Like A Pro! Set of three interactive biosecurity case studies set in Argentina, Uganda, and the UK. Developed as part of the 2018 Next Generation for Biosecurity competition, which is a project of NTI | bio and the Next Generation GHS Network.

• Malice Analysis Half-day workshop put on by the Engineering Biology Research Consortium to help life sciences graduate students and biotechnology professionals assess risks in their own work. Most recent instances have been virtual and free, because pandemic, but I don’t know if it’s exactly an “online course”.

[agent18]

May I ask why you think these are good? Do you know anyone who did it and got “ahead” in their career or?

Thanks.

[Bojack]

I did the Singer course, and assuming I have an average knowledge about EA , I didn’t gain much from it except maybe getting excited about kidney donations. Also I have participated in the community more after taking the course, if that counts as “getting ahead”.

[agent18]

I would think this somehow led to or was a “prime factor” in getting an EA job.

[Bojack]

Unfortunately, I’m still a student so it doesn’t apply in my case.

This post mentions learning more about EA as a way to become a better charity entrepreneur, maybe the same principle applies to getting an EA job.

I would suggest auditing the course and (only) watching videos about the unfamiliar topics.

[EdoArad🔸]

As for the MIT courses, there has been this recent (glowing!) review.

I actually don’t know how good is Singer’s course 😊 This makes me curious about it’s impact. It’s probably more in outreach than getting ahead.