I think I've only really taken one MOOC, that was Shiller's course on Financial Markets. It's a bit slow, but he has a lot of good anecdotes.
Ask HN: What are the best MOOCs you've taken?
141–150 of 320 posts
Re: Ask HN: What are the best MOOCs you've taken?
#142The AI class (Udacity now) with Thrun and Norvig was fun.
I had found it useful also. It has a lot of bugs though. The instructors often faced the heat on the forums for not thinking the problems through. It's hard after all to be teaching a group of some X0,000 students, noting that some then would have intelligence levels well exceeding the instructors (no matter how accomplished they are).
Re: Ask HN: What are the best MOOCs you've taken?
#143I took the Programming Languages course on Coursera which is so far the best course for me. It changed the way I learn any new programming language. https://www.coursera.org/learn/programming-languages I see that they have split the course into 2 parts.
Could you expand on how it changed things for you? How did you learn them before vs after?
It dispels all the magic around programming, by helping you build a knowledge of computer programming agnostic to any programming language. Dan Grossman is a superb teacher and the way he ties concepts together is awesome. I'll be forever glad for this MOOC.
Re: Ask HN: What are the best MOOCs you've taken?
#144Fast.ai's (fast.ai) deep learning and machine learning courses. No ads, good notes/forum, and very approachable material for anyone that knows basic coding.
Have you considered deeplearning.ai? I was on the fence between the two, but ended up taking deeplearning.ai after reading a review[0]. > The fast AI course mainly teaches you the art of driving while Andrew’s course primarily teaches you the engineering behind the car. I'll probably take some of the fast.ai courses at some point, but the deeplearning.ai one was great. [0]: https://towardsdatascience.com/thoughts-aft…
I think it totally comes down to your learning style. If you learn best by tinkering with a running system and seeing how your changes affect it and piecing together its foundations that way (like I do), fast.ai is for you. Deeplearning.ai I think appeals more to people who do better with understanding the theoretical foundations before trying to implement something.
Re: Ask HN: What are the best MOOCs you've taken?
#145This is going to be one of those threads that I'll upvote and bookmark and then not revisit till years later. Any idea on how to start setting aside time to take a MOOC? For those of you taking a MOOC, how do you structure your week? It's been years since I've been in college.
It all depends on your work/life schedule, but for me, I have been successful at meeting my learning goals when I do two things:
- Set aside a discrete amount of time for coursework, and stick to it as much as possible
- Do SOMETHING in the course at least once per week, even if it's just watching one video
For the last course (or Udacity Nanodegree in my case) that I completed, I set up this schedule to fit my work/life (I have an infant):
- Watch course videos/do in-class exercises for 2 hrs on 1-2 days after work or during lunch break each week. My goal was to complete all the course videos that went with a project, so that I would be able to do 1 project per weekend. For longer/more complex topics, I would have to stretch this to one project per 2 weeks.
- Complete 1 project every weekend while my baby napped (total 3hrs per weekend day). I usually was able to complete the project during this allotted time, but sometimes had to work at night after putting baby down.
With the above schedule, I was able to complete my program within 3 months, which was slightly ahead of the program's recommended schedule.
You may need to adjust the schedule as you go (life happens) but the main thing is to KEEP GOING, and do your best to visit the classroom and do something - anything - at least once per week.
Re: Ask HN: What are the best MOOCs you've taken?
#146This is going to be one of those threads that I'll upvote and bookmark and then not revisit till years later. Any idea on how to start setting aside time to take a MOOC? For those of you taking a MOOC, how do you structure your week? It's been years since I've been in college.
It's really tough for me to set aside time for a MOOC, even if if it's absolutely critical-path subject material. So, the one or two I actually spend time with each year teaches something that is of a true investment.
If you are already time-strapped, don't stress yourself over things you don't have the time for, but make time if it will benefit you.
Re: Ask HN: What are the best MOOCs you've taken?
#147Is MOOC a commonly used term? I don't believe I've ever seen it before this post. Based on context, the default Wikipedia redirect [1] for it seems correct, but I'm surprised I never knew that concept had a name (and an acronym at that). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massive_open_online_course
I'd never heard it before either. It's just "online course". guess they wanted to feel cooler with an acronym?
Re: Ask HN: What are the best MOOCs you've taken?
#148Robert Sedgewick's Algorithms has been one of the best for me, not only as a general refresher on algorithms, but also as a way of better understanding complexity notations.
I enjoyed the lectures quite a bit, but ran into a lot of trouble with the problem sets. I'm wondering if anyone else had a similar experience, or if I should give it another chance and try some different approach?
The problem I had was that he gave you a mostly finished program which utilizes the percolation algorithm, but then asks you to fill in some data structures and functions to make it work, and finally a test suite should let you know if you've completed that successfully. The issue I had was that there was basically no feedback, or incremental progress that you could make towards a solution. You either understand the full requirements and are able to implement them, or your tests fail and you have to scratch your head some more wondering if you misunderstood the problem or what.
I loved the approach that Tim Roughgarden's stanford algorithms class took on Coursera, where you're actually implementing the full algorithm and are given some data sets to test them on. You could even write it in whatever language you choose.
I really wanted to do professor Sedgewick's course but I felt like I couldn't do the assignment even if I understood the algorithm perfectly. Would love some advice if anyone has any suggestions, or even if someone can confirm that I'm not crazy for having a bad time with it.
Re: Ask HN: What are the best MOOCs you've taken?
#149Most fun: Pat Pattison, Songwriting, Coursera. Very good lectures, very good material, very well presented. Teaches a lot about writing song lyrics in just 6 weeks, breaks it nicely down to steps and recipes. I used to think that the best feature of MOOCs is the automatic grading and feedback from programming homework, but in this course, for the homework songwriting you gave and got feedback from 3-5 random people i…
> Nicest: Andrew Ng, Machine Learning, Coursera. Interesting topic, well-planned material, very well avoids going into the mathy details, but still conveys a feeling of understanding of the topic, so accessible to a wide audience. (Martin Odersky, Functional Programming Principles in Scala, Coursera, was almost equally nice, but had some rough edges in the first run.) Have to agree with all of this. I've taken Andrew…
Agreed Ng's Machine Learning and Odersky's FP in Scala were my favorites. I'm looking for a good bioinformatics course at the moment. I wrote a small program for my daughter that attempts to find CRISPR sites for my daughter and it would be great to know more of the background.
Re: Ask HN: What are the best MOOCs you've taken?
#150Nand2Tetris was my favorite. I can't say the information (particularly the first half) has much practical application for me, but it was a lot of fun and deepened my understanding of what's going on at a low level. Homework is very well designed with a simulator you download to test your work on, then submit for automatic grading. Udacity's Differential Equations course was pretty awesome too. I had taken Calculus pr…
Yes, Nand2Tetris was great! I learned so much and it was challenging and fun.