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Ask HN: Courses like Coursera or Udemy but without the videos?

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Re: Ask HN: Courses like Coursera or Udemy but without the videos?

#12

Post by RogerL »

Lorena Barba at GW agrees with you (and so do I). Here is one of her MOOCs: http://openedx.seas.gwu.edu/courses/GW/MAE6226/2014_spring/a...

She uses python & Jupyter Notebook to present the course, not video, for the reasons you mentioned. She is one of the people who got me started writing my book in Jupyter Notebook (mine is not part of a MOOC).

I'm pretty sure that what you are looking for doesn't exist in large scale. Someone already mentioned this, but probably the MIT OCW is the closest (many classes have no video, only lecture notes).

Re: Ask HN: Courses like Coursera or Udemy but without the videos?

#13

Post by dimva »

I think this is because it's much easier to lecture in front of a camera than to spend time creating an easy-to-follow tutorial with illustrations. Compare the number of professors who lecture undergraduates with the number who write textbooks or blog posts for the general public.

Re: Ask HN: Courses like Coursera or Udemy but without the videos?

#14

Post by rgovind »

dudul wrote: post #5

> paid (or free) tutorials, which uses text and pictures to convey information rather than videos. Isn't it called a "book"? :) I'm with you, I often find videos on Coursera et all pretty useless and inefficient. More effective for me to just buy a book on the topic I want to learn about.

Kind of true. It is called a book. But I want something in between a book and a blog post/tutorial. Not sure what it is though. And if it is structured as a course, I am more likely to stick to it and complete it.

Re: Ask HN: Courses like Coursera or Udemy but without the videos?

#16

Post by rgovind »

relkor wrote: post #8

If you are willing to wait 8 weeks, my budding company is building a search engine for explanations of things that could help you find what you are looking for. I too have had this problem in finding educational resources, and we are working to improve on the usual googleing experience. I cannot promise much right now, but you are not alone in your search. Let me know if you would like a beta key?

Cool. Happy to test drive. Email in profile.

Re: Ask HN: Courses like Coursera or Udemy but without the videos?

#17

Post by RogerL »

dudul wrote: post #5

> paid (or free) tutorials, which uses text and pictures to convey information rather than videos. Isn't it called a "book"? :) I'm with you, I often find videos on Coursera et all pretty useless and inefficient. More effective for me to just buy a book on the topic I want to learn about.

No, a book is called a "book", and a class is not a book.

Classes entail teaching, homework, grades, a final exam, and TAs. You are supported in your learning efforts.

A few books/textbooks are structured for self-learning, but most are not. Just picking up a textbook on fluid dynamics (say) and expecting to work through it without support and guided practice is a pipe dream for all but the most dedicated autodidact.

Re: Ask HN: Courses like Coursera or Udemy but without the videos?

#20

Post by vikp »

This is very specific to data science for now, but I'm working on Dataquest (https://www.dataquest.io), which has interactive explanations and diagrams. It's almost entirely reading theory and explanations + writing code. It's hard to get broad coverage like udemy/coursera, but it's a problem we'd love to work on in the future.

I've liked scotch.io for some dev things, and thinkster.io for some Angular/frontend.

Also check out these IPython notebooks for a ton of topics: https://github.com/ipython/ipython/wiki/A-gallery-of-interes... .

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