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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?

#41

Post by hackart »

aklemm wrote: post #26
hackart wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Any idea where to get the lecture videos for CS144?

When i had started they were available on Lagunita. Looks like the same videos are available on Youtube.

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

#42

Post by ghaff »

frankie_t wrote: post #36
sbdmmg wrote: post #5

Just finished "Model Thinking" [1] taught by Scott E. Page. I really enjoyed this class. It provided me with several very useful mathematical tools to think more clearly about important and frequent problems. Scott is a great teacher. [1] https://www.coursera.org/learn/model-thinking

I've seen this one in 'the old days', but never actually took it, just skimmed through the introduction. It was hard for me to grasp what I would take from it, even though it seemed interesting. Can you please summarize what you took from the course? How would you use outside of the course the information you've learned? I would imagine something like "I've learned a model A that can be applied at real life situation…

That was one of the few MOOCs I completed back in the day. I don't really remember everything in the course--but not everything needs to be practical. One interesting thing I specifically do remember is Schelling's model which basically demonstrated that fairly subtle preferences can lead to very different outcomes.

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

#43

Post by PNWChris »

darepublic wrote: post #9

Took the fast.ai course

+1 from me. I really liked Fast.ai part 1 and can't speak highly enough of it! I plan to do part 2 in the near future once I have a bit more time on my hands.

The course is project oriented and quite concrete (focusing on practical/directly usable knowledge, before diving into impl details and math) so I liked it a lot more than anything I had tried before (courses on Coursera, studying on Kahn Academy).

Not only did I actually learn, the course gave me the skills and motivation needed to build my own toy project[0]!

@OP: Give Fast.ai's course (part 1)[1] a try. You'll train your own image classifier by the end of lesson 2. At that point you'll know if you like or dislike the course's style.

[0]: https://ml-hot-or-cold.projects.chrisjeakle.com/ [1]: https://course.fast.ai/

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

#44

Post by ghaff »

nikisweeting wrote: post #11

Does anyone know any good introductory/intermediate neuroscience MOOCs? My favorite one by Henry Lester got deleted off Coursera unfortunately.

You might look through MIT Course 9 materials on OCW. https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/brain-and-cognitive-sciences/

MIT's Intro courses in this department have long been excellent and very neuroscience oriented.(The caveat is most of what's on OCW here is fairly old.)

There's also at least one course on edX https://www.edx.org/course/minds-and-machines although I don't know anything about it.

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

#45

Post by galoisscobi »

searchableguy wrote: post #40
jlelonm wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No offense, but are you joking? This is an extremely cynical take. You don't see any benefit to having one mega amazing course? You think there's no way to overcome the limitation you mentioned (bad information) at all? How about a peer review process?

Why does it even need to be one mega course? Millions of institutions exist. Even if you take 1% of them and tell them to create a freely available course, it's good enough. Beside, I don't understand how many public funded universities don't release everything they do or teach. It's just weird imo. Why does education need to be expensive? Why should you have to pay for it? It's one of those things that I don't under…

+1 to the idea of having a few good math courses created by institutions. I think if I can save all that time on repetitive lecturing, it would make more time for discussion/experimentation based learning.

I’ve also wondered about why publicly funded institutions don’t publicly release their courses and other resources. When the COVID lockdown started, I naively hoped that we would get some more pure math courses since now universities are teaching remotely but haven’t really found any universities doing that. I’m tempted to reach out to my alma mater and ask if I can audit their pure math courses that they’re teaching remotely in the fall.

It definitely seems easier to find CS courses online than for pure math. Maybe because there’s a wider audience for that, I don’t quite know.

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

#46

Post by tobinfricke »

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 was wondering whether this might be "the" Robert Morris, made famous by the internet worm. After a glance at his MIT web page I concluded, no, this is a different Robert Morris. This one looks much too young! But he is the Robert Morris.

https://www.csail.mit.edu/person/robert-morris

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Tappan_Morris

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

#47

Post by runawaybottle »

bherb wrote: post #31
runawaybottle wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

And did you find any? I'd be interested as well.

It’s sparse, I’ve actually been looking for AWS courses and things are thin on that front too. To add to it, it’s hard for me to even assess anything since I don’t know how to assess if it’s good.

Now I know how people shopping around for a coding bootcamp feel.

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

#48

Post by manish_gill »

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…

This course is incredible. If anyone who had a hand in putting it together is reading, they have my thanks for putting out such an incredible course. I've done 2 labs and 5-6 lectures of this course so far and I find it absolutely worth it. I just wish I were a bit more disciplined about it (the pandemic made a lot of things harder for me). My goal is to eventually finish it and then make my own version of the Distributed KV store (perhaps in Rust?), and then perhaps even do a good Databases courses.

So far, it's allowed me to dive deep into how Map Reduce works, I even presented GFS in a local Distributed Systems group, and was able to understand Raft. I'm currently doing Raft labs (which is when the Pandemic happened). I've designed some sharding schemes in my previous company and worked a lot on Streaming systems but learning the theory behind everything is amazing.

If there are people here who would like to put a serious joint effort into doing this course, I would absolutely 100% be interested in it. Doing this alone from my apartment in a foreign country gets a bit tricky vs doing it in a group setting. :)

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

#49

Post by michaelt »

IMAYousaf wrote: post #37

I got to help teach one! This answer doesn't answer the question that was prompted, but I volunteered for Stanford's Code in Place (introductory CS) and it was kind of amazing getting to be on the other side of the MOOC experience as a TA. I lead 5 assigned class sessions with a small group of people (never more than 10) and held 5 other office hour style sessions as well. It was a really rewarding experience and I t…

The google results for that are pretty sparse - what are the criteria to be eligible to volunteer?

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

#50

Post by randomusrname »

tobinfricke wrote: post #46
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 was wondering whether this might be "the" Robert Morris, made famous by the internet worm. After a glance at his MIT web page I concluded, no, this is a different Robert Morris. This one looks much too young! But he is the Robert Morris. https://www.csail.mit.edu/person/robert-morris https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Tappan_Morris

I don't know if you've noticed, but Robert Tappan Morris (the worm guy), is one of the founders of Y Combinator which owns Hackernews.
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