Ask HN: Courses like Coursera or Udemy but without the videos? • Hacker News Board

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

#41

Post by relkor » Fri, Jan 01, 2016, 8:29 PM UTC

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?

As I mentioned above, we are some weeks out from having an MVP. Our current sprint is actually building a frontend for the search engine. If you are still interested, please send me an email (in profile) and I will ping you back in about 2 weeks when we have something for you to interact with.

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

#42

Post by psibi » Fri, Jan 01, 2016, 8:30 PM UTC

omarshaikh wrote: post #34

Packt Publishing has great books to jump start on many technologies. The books are written by programmers, for programmers. They have a library subscription that I use. https://www.packtpub.com/

I'm not so sure about the quality of the recent Packt books. They seem to be concentrating more on quantity rather than quality. I was approached by them to write a book on a topic that I wasn't good at!

Also incidents[0] like this don't really make a good impression about them.

[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/1rj2jq/book_haskel...

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

#43

Post by FanaHOVA » Fri, Jan 01, 2016, 8:30 PM UTC

What works for me is playing the vids at 1.75x speed when I feel like there isn't a high density of concepts being explained. Sometimes I just watch them at 1.25x the whole time because the lecturer is slow paced. Try experiment with this stuff and see if it's just the video format that you don't like or the speed in which it's served.

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

#44

Post by Adam_O » Fri, Jan 01, 2016, 8:42 PM UTC

Reading the replies in this thread got me thinking it would be nice if an online course site allowed searching within all the subtitles of all the videos it hosts, and would provide results to all videos containing the searched keyword so you could get access to many explanations and side-notes about a concept, fast.. I think it goes against their business model though.

Also, many MOOCs do support optional texts, but they are not always free.

Perhaps the right mix is somewhere down the middle.. a course that gives you all the course materials in a jupyter notebook + makes help videos available as well, and the student can pick their desired learning path (like http://cs109.github.io/2015/pages/videos.html)

Finally, I really like those "Manga guide to" books from No Starch Press, but they are more like fun supplementary resources.

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

#45

Post by alashley » Fri, Jan 01, 2016, 9:24 PM UTC

rgovind wrote: post #25

Artemis2 wrote: post #6

Take a look at Tuts+: http://tutsplus.com/

I don't understand this website. It still seems like video based learning. Am I missing something?

They have some text-based tutorials here: https://code.tutsplus.com/

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

#46

Post by bphogan » Fri, Jan 01, 2016, 9:25 PM UTC

Adam_O wrote: post #44

Reading the replies in this thread got me thinking it would be nice if an online course site allowed searching within all the subtitles of all the videos it hosts, and would provide results to all videos containing the searched keyword so you could get access to many explanations and side-notes about a concept, fast.. I think it goes against their business model though. Also, many MOOCs do support optional texts, but…

> it would be nice if an online course site allowed searching within all the subtitles of all the videos it hosts,

Yes it would. But a lot of the videos I see are not subtitled. They should be though, for accessibility purposes.

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

#47

Post by krmmalik » Sat, Jan 02, 2016, 12:21 AM UTC

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?

I'd be interested as well please. Khurammalik[dot]me@google's email service

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

#48

Post by sotojuan » Sat, Jan 02, 2016, 2:54 AM UTC

psibi wrote: post #42

omarshaikh wrote: post #34

Packt Publishing has great books to jump start on many technologies. The books are written by programmers, for programmers. They have a library subscription that I use. https://www.packtpub.com/

I'm not so sure about the quality of the recent Packt books. They seem to be concentrating more on quantity rather than quality. I was approached by them to write a book on a topic that I wasn't good at! Also incidents[0] like this don't really make a good impression about them. [0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/1rj2jq/book_haskel...

Packt has always had a bad signal to noise ratio. The sheer amount of books they publish should be a warning sign.

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

#49

Post by sotojuan » Sat, Jan 02, 2016, 2:58 AM UTC

RogerL wrote: post #12

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 s…

Honestly for difficult technical subjects in technology, science, or mathematics, nothing beats a good book with exercises along with lecture videos or notes (just like MIT OCW gives you). There are some great Coursera courses, but many don't do the subject justice.

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

#50

Post by zhte415 » Sat, Jan 02, 2016, 4:28 AM UTC

I agree. The key reason is the need for the audience to be linear. That's what I'm addressing in the LMS I'm putting together for my company ;)

* Videos really do add a lot of value. But all video... makes it into a movie, despite exercises that can be done later, it is a movie experience.

* Videos create a personal touch and engagement with a user. That is valuable for a lot of people.

* Video in something technical lets others see workflow. I great example was for a beginner introduction to Spring where the instructor showed how to set getters and setters in Eclipse. Fantastic quick kill in terms of delivering something useful that wouldn't work in text.

* A lot of instructors don't like putting their face on the internet. They just don't.

* A combination of media all on one page is what I'm going for, and have mainly achieved. It does turn the page a bit long (of course assisted by sidebars) but text, video example, some interactive content, some links to resources be it citations, PDFs or other, work very well.

At least, for me.

And I'm doing this in a second language, Chinese. Nightmare, but really interesting. If you're in the LMS space and interested in getting in contact, email me at my QQ address in profile.