Here’s one for your daily commute (or routine). Due to the pandemic, we have ventured into various things to kill time or beat boredom for nearly two years now. We have gone from learning how to make a Dalgona Coffee to bingeing on Ube Pandesal. Some of us developed our green thumb and suddenly became plantitos and plantitas; others spent their time on online courses.
Incidentally, some of us invested our time learning new things. Whether it be a new language or a philosophical principle, we search through the ridiculously wide internet for resources and learning materials. But hey, whether you prefer to chill and stare at the window—watching birds and the bees, or listen to helpful podcasts or enroll on online courses, you do you.
So, we are sharing with you one of the many exciting finds you could sign yourself up with. If you are exploring your individuality and would like to improve your overall well-being, including your concept of happiness, carry on reading. Having said that, if you are one of those people who just love to enroll on short online courses for learning, you may have already heard Coursera.
Coursera is an online course provider that works with universities in the US to offer online courses. You have the option to sign up for no certification, free of charge learning, or you can also sign up for a fee; both will give you full access to the learning materials.
Finding online course resources
One of our favorite courses inside Coursera is Yale University Professor Laurie Santos’ lecture about The Science of Well-Being. The course aims to help you increase your own happiness and establish more productive habits—a much-needed reminder in these pandemic-ridden days. The course ran for ten weeks, with a few quizzes you may take, spread across the entire course duration.
It is human nature to share the new things we learn. But it’s more beneficial to lead people to where they can learn these new things on their own. In The Science of Well-Being course, Professor Laurie Santos introduced the G.I. Joe Fallacy, something she developed along with Yale Philosopher Tamar Gendler.
The G.I. Joe Fallacy is the mistaken idea that knowing is enough to change your behavior. The course will teach you that we have to do all kinds of stuff other than just knowing stuff to change our behavior. Change of behavior = change of habits. Merely knowing something will not suffice if there is something you would like to substantially change in you.
If you are curious about why they named it that way and what it has to do with increasing your own happiness, check out the online course here and see for yourself. There are a lot more platforms and pages that offer free online courses that could enrich our well-being. While they’re there, we must maximize these resources. The best things in life are free, so take advantage and use it to become a better version of yourself when you find one.
This article is not a paid advertisement.
