Personal Branding by University of Virginia
The first MOOC was short and sweet. I took away 6 main learnings:
1. Get to now yourself, then you can sell yourself. In terms of branding, built it on a niche within a niche.
2. Be established on at least 2 platforms.
3. Know what you stand for and what your mission is. I found the 3 cornerstone words interesting, it helped me reflect on what is important for me to live by.
4. When building a board of directors, have a small team who will respect you, care about your success, and will be open to be honest with you.
5. Always check your social media setting! Do this monthly.
6. Create a routine for your own brand management. 80% of what you post should interest your “followers”, 20% should be about self-promotion, otherwise, you will lose them quick!
Perhaps surprisingly, I decided to sign-up to Twitter after this course. I had only LinkedIn prior, but I thought to broaden my horizon a little after this MOOC. Afterall, I can always remove my data after, right…? This course allowed me to add Twitter and Coursera to my final PLE.
Circular Economy: An Introduction by TU Delft
The circular economy course was very well established and took significantly longer to complete.
My main takeaways from each of the 6 main episodes:
Episode 1: The 4 kex principles of circular economy are: food = waste, build resilience through diversity, use renewable systems, and think in systems.
Episode 2: There are 4 key types of business values in the circular economy: 1) sourcing, 2) environmental, 3) customer, and 4) informational. The latter is one I have never considered before, but it really is a powerful tool that can help companies optimise their product.
Episode 3: Follow the inertia principle to preserve the integrity of the products for as long as possible.
Episode 4: There are 3 general barriers to remanufacturing: 1) remanufactured products are perceived to be inferior to new products, but of course, this is not the case, they are as good as, if not better, than new. This requires a change in mind set from society.
Episode 5: The section was on recycling and nothing ground-breaking was introduced, sorry TU Delft! A rather interesting topic introduced here, however, was biomimicry. I enjoyed learning about how engineers, designers, and scientists study nature to implement solutions to functional problems we experience! E.g., the aerodynamics of Japan’s bullet train was inspired by a bird’s beak!
Episode 6: Systems thinking and its feedback loop to achieve equilibrium. Basically, inflow = outflow = system in equilibrium = circular economy. But of course, this takes time. We can estimate time for circular economy (which is different for different systems) by 3 metrics: 1) population stabilisation time, 2) urban mine stock build-up until demand/person stabilises and 3) product lifespan assumption. The combination of the three gives you the estimated time to reach a circular economy.
This second MOOC really added to my knowledge on circular economy, introducing some new concepts. To my PLE, it added the edX platform, which has many other interesting courses, such as “Water and Climate”, also by TU Delft.
My final PLE is demonstrated below.
