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Ask HN: Did you take any fresh MOOCs as of 2020?

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Re: Ask HN: Did you take any fresh MOOCs as of 2020?

#14

Post by runawaybottle »

stevekemp wrote: post #2

I'm a sysadmin/developer/devops-guy, but despite "knowing" Docker I had a lot of fun going through this course, once I'd completed it I found I'd learned a few useful things, and my understanding was much more comprehensive: https://devopswithdocker.com/ My first time doing online-learning, and registering for the university, but now I've done it I'm gonna work my way through a few more of the courses. (You don't nee…

Thanks, was actually looking for good devops courses the other day.

Re: Ask HN: Did you take any fresh MOOCs as of 2020?

#16

Post by read_if_gay_ »

Stanford CS193p: SwiftUI iOS App Development. Been meaning to get into iOS dev for a while, but it’s frustrating because learning resources outdate so fast. This course is new though (as in ~2 months) and only teaches current stuff. (Just need to finish it before everything moves on to Xcode 12...)

Re: Ask HN: Did you take any fresh MOOCs as of 2020?

#17

Post by hackart »

otras wrote: post #10

MIT's 6.824: Distributed Systems (taught by Robert Morris) is completely open and available online, and it includes video lectures, notes, readings, and programming assignments from as recent as Spring 2020 (including half of the lectures recorded from home as the pandemic strikes). The assignments even include auto-graded testing scripts, so you can verify your solution to the assignments. It's not necessarily a MOO…

I agree.

One of the best courses i had taken on Coursera was the Algorithms series by Robert Sedgewick. Apart from going through the lectures, i had obtained a great satisfaction from solving the assignments. But this year, i have taken up the lab assignments for the following: https://cs144.github.io/ https://tc.gts3.org/cs3210/2020/spring/info.html

Both have been recommended earlier on HN.

Next on my list is 6.824

Re: Ask HN: Did you take any fresh MOOCs as of 2020?

#18

Post by FabHK »

I've taken the Udacity Flying Car nanodegree recently (during their free month promotion). It's from 2018.

Plusses:

* neat environment to work with: there's a drone and plane simulator based on Unity3D's Unity Player and NVIDIA PhysX that you connect to from Python, as well as another full simulator implemented with OpenGL (in C++).

* Considerable ground covered: representation, path planning, drone control, estimation, even basics of sensor fusing. Optionally, you can implement a full autopilot for a fixed wing plane.

Neutral:

* All the boilerplate code is provided (Python, C++), and you're asked to fill in the blanks here and there. So, one avoids a lot of hassle. On the other hand, you know, the instructions say "Compute the new variance matrix after the transition using the formula \Sigma_t = G \Sigma_{t-1} GˆT + Q", and then you plug in the line

  ekfCov = G * ekfCov * G.transpose() + Q;
and now you've implemented an Extended Kalman filter in C++. Right.

Minuses:

* quite some mistakes. The course seems to get little love and few updates or bug fixes. If I had paid for it, I'd be miffed.

* not too much going on in the chat and discussion forum.

As to your points:

1. more "vocational" courses: Yes. Some of it seems more or less designed to quickly train the next generation of code monkeys.

2. paid model: Absolutely. Without the COVID-19 free month, this would have cost EUR 400 per month. Steep.

3. anytime you want: Agreed, the social element was pretty thin. I had the one month deadline before the billing would kick in, so that was useful for self-motivation.

4. more variety: yes, hard to identify good ones, particularly in combination with #2 (pay to study).

Re: Ask HN: Did you take any fresh MOOCs as of 2020?

#20

Post by bhntr3 »

I agree with your assessment. Most of the MOOC websites have shifted to being much less academic, more applied and are pushing paid credentials. It doesn't seem like most of the top universities are creating much new content for Coursera or Edx compared to 2013.

I mostly use MIT open courseware for self learning. A lot of course websites are also online and if I hear about an interesting course at some University I'll just google the course number. Stanford online and MIT ocw have a lot of lectures on their YouTube channels and I've found some interesting lectures just searching YouTube for a topic. When I wanted assignments and lectures for Russell and Norvig's AI textbook, I googled "Russell AI course" and stumbled on Berkeley's AI course. I've been enjoying it.

How has the social aspect + taking the course with others helped you in the past? I never found it that important. But I have always preferred self learning even in college.

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