I took the deeplearning specialisation on Coursera by Andrew Ng. The first two courses were good, but after that the quality of the content quickly deteriorated. Video lectures were not properly edited, you could see Andrew repeating his lines over and over again, which should have been taken out in post. Programming exercises felt like fill-in-the-blanks and the libraries used were severely outdated. Thank God it was paid for by my institution.
Ask HN: Did you take any fresh MOOCs as of 2020?
51–60 of 89 posts
Re: Ask HN: Did you take any fresh MOOCs as of 2020?
#52Discrete Optimization by Pascal van Hentenryck on Coursera. Fun class with great professor. Highly recommended if you’re interested in the subject.
I love this course. It has better production than other courses that I've taken and Pascal is super passionate and fun (dresses like Indiana Jones to make a point about knapsacks); much more engaging than Norvig. The course is hard though, he's not kidding about needing 20 or so hours per week.
Re: Ask HN: Did you take any fresh MOOCs as of 2020?
#53MIT'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…
There is an active Clojure study group that just formed, for anybody interested. I've started lab 1 and am finding it incredibly interesting so far.
For anybody who has completed the 2020 spring version (the lab code recently changed), did you have any issues with the lab 1 test script? I think they left out the merging files part when porting to the 2020 version which causes tests to fail.
https://www.reddit.com/r/mit6824clojure/comments/hfm0hk/rmit...
Re: Ask HN: Did you take any fresh MOOCs as of 2020?
#54Side note: With Corona and the rise of biotechnology, I hope we'll see some excellent courses in natural / hard science in the near future. I'd love to switch into the SynBio industry, but lack the willingness for another university degree. I also strongly prefer remote learning over onsite lectures.
Of course, you'd need some onside presence for lab work. That's the tricky and costly part. Still, if the future is bio, then demand will skyrocket.
Re: Ask HN: Did you take any fresh MOOCs as of 2020?
#55Yes! Signed up to 6 courses. Never started any of them. I'm going back to learning by doing and a few paper books.
Re: Ask HN: Did you take any fresh MOOCs as of 2020?
#56MIT'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…
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Re: Ask HN: Did you take any fresh MOOCs as of 2020?
#57I 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'l…
In terms of mind-expanding or intellectually stimulating, I find it's easier to get that from Youtube. I recommend:
3blue1brown for math (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYO_jab_esuFRV4b17AJtAw)
Everyday Astronaut if you are casually interested in rockets (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC6uKrU_WqJ1R2HMTY3LIx5Q)
Bret Victor (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUv66718DII&list=PLS4RYH2Xfp...) or Rich Hickey (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f84n5oFoZBc&list=PLXsqD83He-...) for programming and design.
Doing a full college course is such a time investment and it usually takes a few weeks to start proving the interesting stuff. I find it more fun to look to shorter content for inspiration. I might realize I don't understand the fundamentals of the topic and then seek out a way to study it.
Re: Ask HN: Did you take any fresh MOOCs as of 2020?
#58MIT'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 Distri…
Are the auto graders sufficient in verifying the solution ? Often the TAs have their own private scripts for enrolled students. Just a detail I wanted to know :)
Re: Ask HN: Did you take any fresh MOOCs as of 2020?
#59Any good courses on python and building rest APIs with Django? Out anything really, looking to up my Python skills
Not a MOOC, but I'd recommend: https://www.django-rest-framework.org/tutorial/quickstart/
Re: Ask HN: Did you take any fresh MOOCs as of 2020?
#60Just 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
easily one of the best courses around. teaches you a new way to look at problems. having learned about automata in cs, and see it applied to social sciences was mind blowing.