Earlier quoted context omitted.
iTunes university is really quite awesome. Only you need an Apple product to access it.
iTunes runs on Windows
There are also bunch of third party apps for Android and Linux that let you download iTunes U lectures.
List of the Most Popular MOOCs
51–60 of 88 posts
Re: List of the Most Popular MOOCs
#52I'm not sure whether the number of people enrolled in a course is a very good measure for the impact of a course. I agree with some other commenters that the number of people that completed a course isn't necessarily a good measure either. Some measure that includes the percentage of videos watched, exercises attempted, links followed, etc. would probably better represent the actual impact of a course.
Some considerations: all courses have lots of people that enroll to subsequently discover the course is hard, boring or otherwise not what they expected. I expect this number varies strongly per course. On the other hand, not attempting/passing exercises doesn't mean someone hasn't invested time in watching all lectures.
Re: List of the Most Popular MOOCs
#53Im 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 is a big reason why Coursera is so appealing and it won in the MOOC race. By having a few open sessions a year, they can provide official support from course TA and students all gather in an active forum to discuss the material and help each other. It's why MIT's OpenCourseWare is not nearly as popular as Coursera. I'd argue it's a must for the to keep going with this approach, otherwise it will turn into another OpenCourseWare.
Re: List of the Most Popular MOOCs
#54Im 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 heartily recommend using this[0] tool for any Coursera course you are currently taking.
Re: List of the Most Popular MOOCs
#55Im 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…
[deleted]
Re: List of the Most Popular MOOCs
#56Interesting 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 did follow a few courses on coursera and I remember the professor saying that the number of students who successfully completed the first/previous iteration of the course was around ~5% or less, so I'd say you are right on the money.
Re: List of the Most Popular MOOCs
#57I am surprised that Khan Academy is not recognized in this report probably because the scope is limited to just those offer by an accredited university. I think calculus and chemistry have helped many first and second years of college students taking introductory courses including myself. I think KA is probably the most popular MOOC for all ages, in the most accessible way given it only requires a YouTube account, which millions have for over a decade. But that's just my opinion.
YouTube has a few really amazing courses available online.
For example, UCB has a channel with up-to-date content that otherwise not available on MOOC platform.
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QMV45tHCYNI is a very good class on data structure
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HyUK5RAJg1c and the rest has very good lectures on theory of computation
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_G6_-ljgmXE also very good for algorithms. I find MIT's version to be too theory based for practitioners. Anyway, I still watch MIT's just to complement anything missing (no two speakers can teach the same topic equally)
Re: List of the Most Popular MOOCs
#58Im 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 is a big reason why Coursera is so appealing and it won in the MOOC race. By having a few open sessions a year, they can provide official support from course TA and students all gather in an active forum to discuss the material and help each other. It's why MIT's OpenCourseWare is not nearly as popular as Coursera. I'd argue it's a must for the to keep going with this approach, otherwise it will turn into anothe…
There's really no "right" answer to how asynchronous courses should be. On the one hand, if you just open things up, make some videos available, maybe some machinery for auto-grading where appropriate, I'm not sure you can meaningfully call that material a MOOC at that point. It's some YouTube videos with an associated website of which there are already many for all sorts of content.
On the other hand, if you run things on a tight schedule, real life will get in the way for a lot of people in that many of the better courses are fairly significant time commitments.
Re: List of the Most Popular MOOCs
#59It's insufficient to measure Popularity as the total number of registrants. People browse through course offerings, register, and may never return.
Rating by the total number of students that completed a course would be even more revealing. Add a student retention rate, too. Etc etc.
Re: List of the Most Popular MOOCs
#60I'll just throw in a plug here for Prof. Abu-Mostafa's Learning from Data course at Caltech, which is outstanding: http://work.caltech.edu/telecourse.html
Unlike Andrew Ng's Coursera Machine Learning class, it is a real, unadulterated Caltech class, and exactly as challenging as that implies. It delves much more deeply into the mathematics behind ML, and the homework assignments are quite time consuming.
I took it as part of an interactive session through EdX, and the professor himself was extremely active on the forums: responding to student questions, clarifying lecture points, and giving homework suggestions--seemingly at all hours of the day and night.