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List of the Most Popular MOOCs

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31–40 of 88 posts

Re: List of the Most Popular MOOCs

#31

It's heartening there are so many math focused courses. With the Calculus course at https://www.coursera.org/learn/calculus1/ - I'm going over differential calculus right now, but I'm getting somewhat stuck on the Chain Rule, and in particular working out how to use it to differentiate 2^x. The courses I've found so far haven't been all that helpful, even Khan academy is confusing me somewhat. Does this course explai…

Since 2 = e ^ ln 2, use the identity:

2^x = (e^(ln 2))^x = e ^ (x * ln 2)

Re: List of the Most Popular MOOCs

#32
post #28
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I would agree with and extend your remarks that getting a title of nobility from a brick and mortar uni gives you a vocational meal ticket, so you can motivate grinders by asking if they like money of if they like eating food, and then they'll grind away for letters on a transcript. 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 versi…

It's not clear what you're looking for exactly but, if anything, MOOCs (Coursera at any rate) have cut back on issuing completion certificates in the absence of paying a fee. Their problem, one of them anyway, is that certificates basically aren't worth anything as a certification mechanism in most cases so very few are willing to pay for them.

And, I expect, that if you start from the assumptions that 1.) MOOC certificates aren't worth anything as a real-world "vocational meal ticket" beyond the value of the underlying education and 2.) Companies offering MOOCs are not going to become unicorns and probably won't even return investors money-- you probably end up with something that isn't designed to mirror a university course.

Re: List of the Most Popular MOOCs

#33
post #7

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…

Isn't it possible to just right-click the video and save a copy of it?

Re: List of the Most Popular MOOCs

#34
post #7

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…

I agree. Coursera's approach seems to capture the worst of both worlds of traditional and online ed. It lacks the live lecture and person-to-person contact of a traditional college course. Yet, it maintains the timeboxed approach of traditional ed, which exists chiefly to provide simultaneity, to scale real-life human contact to lecture-hall size. Now I realize that some aspects of the way some courses are run requir…

I'm not sure "live lecture" is a unique positive of a traditional college course, at least if by live lecture you mean room of multi-hundred people. In fact, I'd argue that this aspect is one thing that MOOCs can handle very well. Of course, it's also something that remote learning has been able to handle well at least since the VCR was created. I'd argue that the other thing that MOOCs can do well is automated grading when that's appropriate for the material.

What MOOCs do very badly is peer interactions whether for discussions or grading. Part of it's scale. Part of it's the vast differences in the levels and expectations of the participants. Of course, as you say, it's precisely for these reasons that we force courses to provide simultaneity.

Re: List of the Most Popular MOOCs

#35
post #7

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…

I don't think this is the case will _All_ courses... Most of the CS courses allows you to access resources even after the course is completed.

Also if the course you want to enroll is not scheduled for near future, you can go to the course page and view the older version of the course.

Re: List of the Most Popular MOOCs

#36
post #33
post #7

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…

Isn't it possible to just right-click the video and save a copy of it?

Last I looked at a Coursera course, there are explicit download buttons as well. It's not hard to save the course materials while the course is ongoing, the problem is that the materials are unavailable after the course finishes. You're not always going to know what will or will not be important in the future.

Re: List of the Most Popular MOOCs

#37

It's heartening there are so many math focused courses. With the Calculus course at https://www.coursera.org/learn/calculus1/ - I'm going over differential calculus right now, but I'm getting somewhat stuck on the Chain Rule, and in particular working out how to use it to differentiate 2^x. The courses I've found so far haven't been all that helpful, even Khan academy is confusing me somewhat. Does this course explai…

Since 2 = e ^ ln 2, use the identity: 2^x = (e^(ln 2))^x = e ^ (x * ln 2)

Well, that's the specific example, but there exist a class of educational blocks such that the learner doesn't know where they're stuck, because if they could define it, the act of correctly defining the stuck step would inherently unstick it.

So MOOC strategy works for some areas that don't have sticking points like that, but not so well where five minutes with a Socratic strategy tutor could save a lot of video re-watching time. Arguably, better video would point out likely sticking points. However, advanced math instructors got their position not by getting education degrees which theoretically vocationally train people to present like that, but got their position by being very successful when getting a PHD in an obscure and advanced part of the field. So if you're lucky, your higher math instructor might be a talented educator in addition to being a talented mathematician... but probably not, unfortunately.

It would be interesting as a thought experiment, or maybe as a startup, to see a good (emphasis on good) K-12 math instructor with a strong background in educational teaching skills try to teach diffeqs or higher math in general. I suspect they'd be extremely good at it, although probably very slow.

Re: List of the Most Popular MOOCs

#38
post #16
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yeah, not sure why completion matters. All that matters is whether the user found some useful information in it, and just fully watching one video lecture should be enough for that metric.

Well, in a couple of cases (here is my current list of MOOCs I took part in, if anyone cares: http://pa-mar.net/Main/Study/Onlinecourses.html) in order to get completion you had to submit a end-of-course project which was very interesting in itself, and you also learned a lot because in order to get it "graded" you had to grade at least 5 other projects randomly selected among the other participants.

So you either saw different approaches to the same problem (e.g. Data Analysis) or everyone discussing a different problem (An Introduction to Operations Management). I am sure that I got a lot (in terms of learning) from that part of the course.

If everyone just picks and chooses some papers/videos and drops out before the end you don't get anyone to grade your work and you have no other work to grade (and possibly learn from).

Re: List of the Most Popular MOOCs

#39

The Design Of Computer Programs on Udacity by Peter Norvig is pretty awesome. As someone who's only been seriously programming for a year or two , each problem set went like this : 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.

It's truly the best course I've ever taken for newbies to seriously up their skills. Can't recommend enough.

Re: List of the Most Popular MOOCs

#40

It's heartening there are so many math focused courses. With the Calculus course at https://www.coursera.org/learn/calculus1/ - I'm going over differential calculus right now, but I'm getting somewhat stuck on the Chain Rule, and in particular working out how to use it to differentiate 2^x. The courses I've found so far haven't been all that helpful, even Khan academy is confusing me somewhat. Does this course explai…

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