Ask HN: Did you take any fresh MOOCs as of 2020? • Hacker News Board

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

#71

Post by tobinfricke » Fri, Jul 03, 2020, 7:55 PM UTC

randomusrname wrote: post #50

tobinfricke wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I did not know that!

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

#72

Post by fauxrockpet » Fri, Jul 03, 2020, 8:16 PM UTC

I've been working on cs50-web, an offshoot of cs50; Harvard's introduction to computer science. The community is pretty big, as it contains all the people taking cs50 and it's offshoots. I find the course to be very well put together and find the lectures more broad and interesting than the ones at my uni.

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

#73

Post by dominotw » Fri, Jul 03, 2020, 9:27 PM UTC

aynyc wrote: post #67

dominotw wrote: post #29

I am hoping to train more for my ski instructor certification this year. But i am doing 'mountains 101' during the pandemic https://www.coursera.org/learn/mountains-101

PSIA/CSIA? Or you mean AMGA/IFMGA?

PSIA yeah

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

#74

Post by bhntr3 » Fri, Jul 03, 2020, 10:51 PM UTC

frankie_t wrote: post #69

bhntr3 wrote: post #20

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'l…

MIT OCW is great, I'm very grateful to them for doing this. Still, it's closer to books for me than to MOOCs by overall experience. I have never used much websites for the on-campus courses, they are rarely self-contained and require more organization and research to use. There is one good feature of those: they often have excellent assignments that you often won't find in textbooks, so I think can be a good compleme…

That's a great story! Thanks for taking the time to answer my question. You make good points.

I've experienced links not working. In fact, Berkeley's AI course (https://berkeleyai.github.io/cs188-website/) includes 3 contests but the server no longer accepts submissions for testing let alone actually competing against other students.

There have to be a lot of other people like you and I out there reading textbooks and looking at OCW but never talking to each other. A simple discord server for MIT OCW would be something. I'm currently frustrated because I'm working through the text, lecture notes and problem sets for MIT 6.045J: Automata, Computability and Complexity[0]. But there are no solutions to the problem sets! It's a proof based course and I just want to sanity check if my logic is actually valid.

[0]https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-compu...

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

#75

Post by znpy » Sat, Jul 04, 2020, 12:01 AM UTC

frankie_t wrote: post #21

_tk_ wrote: post #7

Meta: I have had the same question as well and I'm sure that I will have it again in six months. IMO this submission has potential to be a regularly re-submitted post like 'Who is hiring?'.

Well, essentially what I was asking is "is there any good new stuff or is this movement dead", meaning the 2012ish hype of open university knowledge, so I don't think it's a question of a recurring nature. Most of the replies here are more suitable to "what are good moocs", which is fine and what I more or less expected anyway. As to regularly resubmitted post, this kind of touches the issues I asked. If there aren't…

> is there any good new stuff or is this movement dead

There might be some good content, but the movement is definitely dead.

Sebastian Thrun / udacity never actually delivered. You still need to get a bachelor's degree by a regular university to get into oms-cs.

Sad.

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

#76

Post by owl57 » Sat, Jul 04, 2020, 12:42 AM UTC

inasio wrote: post #52

i_don_t_know wrote: post #8

Discrete 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.

The course is hard though

NP-hard, at a rate of one problem per week.

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

#77

Post by untoreh » Sat, Jul 04, 2020, 2:29 AM UTC

maerF0x0 wrote: post #33

xwdv wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not a good idea. One course to rule them all in a field creates a risk of massive amounts of people learning bad information and reinforcing it through sheer majority. Better for people to learn the same information in different ways and from different sources.

I guess I agree in the most extreme (singular case) which i assume would never happen. But I do think that there is an efficient set that is much smaller than 1000s of teachers 2x per year x 40 yrs. Maybe modify my comment ^^ to "dozens" or something like that, and that would naturally be multiplied by languages/countries as I see it unlikely there'd be massive reuse across those boundaries.

it would be more like different courses are best at teaching the same thing in a particular way that works best with a subset of people, so the top would be made of the set of courses that works with the majority of the population. The problem is that the way humans learn is not exactly understood, is it even a finite set? And what is its diatribution? Can it change through time/culture? Can it be identified in genetic traits? So if the learning methodology changes through time the best courses would also follow with it

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

#78

Post by rochak » Sat, Jul 04, 2020, 11:21 AM UTC

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…

Can’t recommend this enough. I have been going through this, but have hit a rough spot because of Coronavirus and an ongoing Internship. It is the first thing I need to resume once my Internship ends.

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

#79

Post by maps7 » Sat, Jul 04, 2020, 12:10 PM UTC

javajosh wrote: post #39

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

I started that course, by my God his presentation is so...sleep-inducing for me. Contrast this with Peter Norvig, who is engaging and scintillates with passion about the subject. By contrast, Sedgewick has this smirk on the whole time, and talks in a monotone. His content is first rate, of course, but sheesh, he's got to work on that pedagogy!

Subjective - I like it

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

#80

Post by aynyc » Sat, Jul 04, 2020, 3:10 PM UTC

dominotw wrote: post #73

aynyc wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PSIA/CSIA? Or you mean AMGA/IFMGA?

PSIA yeah

Cool! I didn’t realize they require you to know that stuff. But it’s great to know that. Mountain and Avalanche training should be a requirement for PSIA.