João Rufino's Blog

As you can see, I haven’t been very active in what regards posting on my blog. My time as been split apart between work and a new challenge that I’m taking. My free time has been dedicated to the remote diploma in the University of Oxford that I mentioned previously.

The diploma in “New economic Powers” has been a very nice experience. The course consists in studying the macro-economy and the decisions taken by several countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China) that allowed them to grow at a higher rate then developed countries and the expectations raised that they will be the “new economic powers” of the XXI century.

The course itself consists in weekly lessons where you are given a few papers to read. Each week we have to write a few blog posts about the subject in hands and do public posts on the forum about questions that are made. We should also contribute to the discussion by commenting on other posts and raise questions. By the end of the course we will have two longer essays that we need to submit for appreciation by the professor.

I really like this system as it allows you to manage your time during the week and you can consider the blog posts and the forum posts as milestones. I’ve been learning a lot and now I understand some decisions that were made by these countries and why they were right or wrong. The discussions and the interpretations made by other colleagues are a great point of interest. The professor often makes comments and replies to the questions made by the lesson after the majority of the people have answered them.

The course is still half way through and the first essay is just around the corner… but I’m very excited with it and I recommend you to investigate these online diplomas from Oxford.

You can find more info about this diploma here. 

Here is the overview of the “new economic powers” diploma:

“In the global economy of the 21st century, Brazil, Russia, India and China (BRIC) are suddenly emerging as major players, shaking up the existing order, and generating waves of uncertainty around the work. Will the US, Japan and Europe be surpassed by these new economic powers? How did these countries achieve their success? Will that success last? What lessons can be learned from their strategies? And how will the world be shaped by their emergence?“

Posted by João Rufino under Internet & Misc | 2 Comments »