21–30 of 88 posts
The courses I've found so far haven't been all that helpful, even Khan academy is confusing me somewhat. Does this course explain things better?
I'm a little surprised that there is no mention of iTunes University, or maybe that doesn't count as a MOOC. I know there are some very popular courses on there that are easy to access.
Im Noticing a lot of these courses are coursera, and one of the most frustrating things about the plattform is the fact that most courses close and access to course materials/videos etc. is revoked after the course is over, this destroys the whole point of a mooc for me, and this choice seems arbitrary. Why cant education materials just be open and remain open to everyone, journals and textbooks included? There are e…
For example, Hinton's class on neural networks from 2012 seems to be open again. https://www.coursera.org/course/neuralnets
Interesting but... I enrolled and completed a couple of the courses listed there. I'd be interested in seeing for each what percentage of enrolled students actually completed the whole course. Anecdotally the numbers are really really low (as in "around 5%").
5% sounds pretty high to me, considering how low (nonexistent, really) the entry barrier is. Where does that figure come from, if I may ask?
Im Noticing a lot of these courses are coursera, and one of the most frustrating things about the plattform is the fact that most courses close and access to course materials/videos etc. is revoked after the course is over, this destroys the whole point of a mooc for me, and this choice seems arbitrary. Why cant education materials just be open and remain open to everyone, journals and textbooks included? There are e…
That said, I agree with your main point, which is that if the billions that go into the journal and textbook scams were redirected to instructors (via higher salaries and resources) and students (via lower tuition costs), we would have a much stronger education system.
Write the code here to do X :
I write a messy 4 liner after lots of thinking.
Professor Norvig comes along and does it in a simple functional one liner.
Mind blown.
He teaches good functional style program design one epiphany at a time.
Interesting but... I enrolled and completed a couple of the courses listed there. I'd be interested in seeing for each what percentage of enrolled students actually completed the whole course. Anecdotally the numbers are really really low (as in "around 5%").
I'm a huge MOOC fan, but after completing a couple of the very early Stanford ones I haven't completed any. Quite frankly I don't see completing a MOOC as the best use of time. I use MOOCs to either pick up new skills I need for work, brush up on stuff I haven't looked at since University or as 'entertainment', basically learning interesting stuff purely for fun. For non of these things actually completing the course…
But in MOOC land I get nothing. I did the complete automata class mostly to see if there's much new since I did a brick and mortar version some decades ago, and the "reward" was not exactly fulfilling. I'm not expecting Ullman to fly out and shake my hand, or my phone to ring off the hook from recruiters seeing I jumped thru some hoops, but something more would have been nice? Actually, anything would have been nice?
Since the grind factor was aggressively burned out of me, I haven't completed a single course. I did watch the videos and did the assignments for computational neuroscience and one of the multi-class algo series and the functional programming and the famous AI class.
There's a lot of talk about how grinders don't grind therefore grinders suck or grinding sucks. However what really sucks is the playground presented to the grinders. Its not their fault they aren't being given something worth grinding.
By analogy most MMORPGs that tanked and died, tanked and died because the grind experience sucked. Its not the fault of the grinders that the businessmen couldn't or wouldn't present something as enjoyably grindable as WoW or Eve.
To some extent the whole market segment of MOOCs smells like a freshmen psych class lab experiment, "what happens to grind performance when you leave all the annoyance factors of grinds in place but remove all the rewards, with the hypothesis that almost every rat in the box stops grinding"
Im Noticing a lot of these courses are coursera, and one of the most frustrating things about the plattform is the fact that most courses close and access to course materials/videos etc. is revoked after the course is over, this destroys the whole point of a mooc for me, and this choice seems arbitrary. Why cant education materials just be open and remain open to everyone, journals and textbooks included? There are e…
Now I realize that some aspects of the way some courses are run require simultaneity. Things like human-powered grading, by TAs or peers. But they don't have to be designed that way. I've taken Coursera courses that are largely machine graded. For those, there doesn't seem to be any real reason why the courses are timeboxed. And even for courses where this is difficult to design around, it seems like it should be possible to tighten the iteration cycle.