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Most of the time, you don’t really need another MOOC

eugeneyan.com

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Re: Most of the time, you don’t really need another MOOC

#51

Post by superbcarrot »

kylebenzle wrote: post #34
minimaxir wrote: post #25

I wrote a similar article 2 years ago ( https://minimaxir.com/2018/10/data-science-protips/ ) arguing against MOOCs for learning data science/machine learning skills, as they are not reflective of real world applications. I'm all for personal projects especially in DS/ML (it's how I started my career in the field), but the unfortunate reality is that there's really no way nowadays to learn the hard/boring parts of DS…

How horribly disappointing. I'm at the tail end of a 6 month, $17,000 online DS bootcamp. I've got some great projects and learned a ton but yeh, they seem to be slowly preparing to let us down. They keep saying how hard it will be to find a job and may take months. LOL, I'm screwed.

It's down to the market. There aren't that many beginner or mid-level jobs in the field and there is a big oversupply of candidates. I wouldn't recommend data science or machine learning to people who are changing career direction or need to invest a lot of time/money/effort to catch up with all the theory. Not that it's impossible, just very hard. It's also getting more and more gatekept over time with increasing requirements for advanced degrees.

Re: Most of the time, you don’t really need another MOOC

#52

Post by utdiscant »

This is basically the reason we are building Eduflow (www.eduflow.com), a learning management system for active learning. Some things can and should be learned by a series of videos, but if you want to learn a real skill deeply, then you need to engage with the material in some way.

Re: Most of the time, you don’t really need another MOOC

#53

Post by compacct27 »

Anyone who's professionally coding right now has one super-effective option that's rarely talked about: Hire someone knowledgeable to walk you through what you're learning.

I've been doing a heavy C++ project, and as a web developer, I was basically a walking footgun. I realized this early on, hired a total expert in the field (the guy has contributed to C++ standards committees before), and am Loving how smoothly this project is going thanks to learning from him. It's incredibly fun.

I pay the guy $150/hr in 10 hour chunks and get the most in-depth insight into what I'm doing, how to revise my code, what the code means in the first place, etc. It's perfect if you know how to code but find yourself in a brand new domain. I still learn outside of our hour-long mentor sessions, of course.

Skip the MOOC, hire the teacher.

..and then also do the MOOC, honestly they're pretty great.

Re: Most of the time, you don’t really need another MOOC

#54

Post by afterwalk »

I personally alternate between taking courses and doing projects.

Doing all MOOC is bad for some of the reasons the articles covered. But doing all projects is also sub-optimal because sometimes it is hard to know what you don't know. Balancing theory and practice works the best for me.

Re: Most of the time, you don’t really need another MOOC

#55

Post by MauranKilom »

culopatin wrote: post #2

As a noob, I feel this. The weird thing is that I am very well aware that tutorials only feel good because I see progress, but that progress is empty. I am aware that confronting a personal project really settles that knowledge in, but I still postpone personal projects whenever I think “I don’t really understand what this means, maybe I should just finish that online course and I’ll be ready”. Also fighting perfecti…

I find the most important thing when learning anything new is a "safe harbor" to explore from. That's why "Hello world!" is so fundamental. And that's why a counter stored into a database is one of the biggest steps you can make - you've wedged the door open and it can't possibly fall shut again. Everything else is incremental from there. And if something doesn't work, you know you can just go a step back and reassess, without starting from zero. Writing code is beautiful like that.

I wish you many productive struggles and subsequent successes in your journey!

Re: Most of the time, you don’t really need another MOOC

#56

Post by UncleOxidant »

compacct27 wrote: post #53

Anyone who's professionally coding right now has one super-effective option that's rarely talked about: Hire someone knowledgeable to walk you through what you're learning. I've been doing a heavy C++ project, and as a web developer, I was basically a walking footgun. I realized this early on, hired a total expert in the field (the guy has contributed to C++ standards committees before), and am Loving how smoothly th…

> $150/hr in 10 hour chunks and get the most in-depth insight into what I'm doing

Yeah, it's... an option, I guess, if you've got the dough. Many of us don't have that kind of budget so we look for some of those experts who have blogs and youtube channels.

Re: Most of the time, you don’t really need another MOOC

#57

Post by miccah »

compacct27 wrote: post #53

Anyone who's professionally coding right now has one super-effective option that's rarely talked about: Hire someone knowledgeable to walk you through what you're learning. I've been doing a heavy C++ project, and as a web developer, I was basically a walking footgun. I realized this early on, hired a total expert in the field (the guy has contributed to C++ standards committees before), and am Loving how smoothly th…

Mentors are definitely a great resource! Of all the learning activities I have tried, having a real person to talk to and ask questions has been the most effective and motivating.

For those who want an easy (and free!) mentor system for learning various programming languages, try Exercism [1]. I have been using it to learn Rust and Clojure.

[1] https://exercism.io

Re: Most of the time, you don’t really need another MOOC

#58

Post by causalmodels »

kylebenzle wrote: post #34
minimaxir wrote: post #25

I wrote a similar article 2 years ago ( https://minimaxir.com/2018/10/data-science-protips/ ) arguing against MOOCs for learning data science/machine learning skills, as they are not reflective of real world applications. I'm all for personal projects especially in DS/ML (it's how I started my career in the field), but the unfortunate reality is that there's really no way nowadays to learn the hard/boring parts of DS…

How horribly disappointing. I'm at the tail end of a 6 month, $17,000 online DS bootcamp. I've got some great projects and learned a ton but yeh, they seem to be slowly preparing to let us down. They keep saying how hard it will be to find a job and may take months. LOL, I'm screwed.

You're not screwed. If you know any working data scientists // MLEs I would really recommend you get feedback from them on your projects. Ask them to do some mock interviews. Way too often I see bootcamp candidates who do well on technical screens but fall apart during in person interviews because they just did what the instructor told them (use docker, put it on github) rather than understanding why people want to see those things.

Re: Most of the time, you don’t really need another MOOC

#59

Post by bserge »

felixr wrote: post #44
EL_Loco wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

JIT in case you were wondering like me: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-in-time_learning

Thanks. I understood JIT == just-in-time because the acronym is used for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-in-time_compilation But I did not realise it was actually an established acronym for learning, too.

It's also used in manufacturing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-in-time_manufacturing

Re: Most of the time, you don’t really need another MOOC

#60

Post by osoba »

Tbh any MOOC that "needs only 2-4 hours a week" is, by design, an entry level course and taking more of those won't help you progress.

On the other hand, you shouldn't lump together and dismiss all MOOCs as there are plenty of more advanced ones that will definitely make a difference. For example, 90% of MIT classes such as Intro to Statistics https://www.edx.org/course/fundamentals-of-statistics or CMU Deep Learning http://deeplearning.cs.cmu.edu/

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