Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: What are some of the best university courses available online for free?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 99 posts

Re: Ask HN: What are some of the best university courses available online for free?

#31

Post by sampo »

Databases by prof. Widom, from Stanford. Currently the course is at edX, and split into 5 mini-courses. Everything in the course is well thought out and apparently polished and perfected over years of teaching practice and experience. There is nothing useless in the video lectures, and the course homework probes every topic from the lectures.

https://online.stanford.edu/courses/soe-ydatabases-databases

Songwriting, at Coursera, from Berklee College of Music. The guy just sits in a dark room, and explains the process of writing lyrics to songs. He just explains it very well.

https://www.coursera.org/learn/songwriting-lyrics

Re: Ask HN: What are some of the best university courses available online for free?

#32

Post by sbuccini »

"The Making of Modern Ukraine" by Timothy Snyder: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLh9mgdi4rNewfxO7LhBoz...

As Prof. Snyder mentions in his introductory lecture, it is kind of wild that there are zero other classes, at any American university, focusing specifically on Ukraine given its importance in the current geopolitical climate.

Prof. Snyder is a great lecturer and the dynamics that shape Ukraine are fascinating and useful for understanding European history more broadly.

Re: Ask HN: What are some of the best university courses available online for free?

#34

Post by Bostonian »

ap916 wrote: post #30
weinzierl wrote: post #18

I've heard only the best things about Andrew Ng's machine learning course but never came around to do it. It is pretty old by now and with the dramatic development in recent times I wonder how relevant it still is?

Apart from the programming exercises being in Matlab (which nobody uses for ML nowadays), the course is still solid. The theoretical concepts and math that the course covers are still relevant and provide a good foundation for someone starting out.

Now it uses Python: https://www.coursera.org/specializations/machine-learning-in...

Re: Ask HN: What are some of the best university courses available online for free?

#35

Post by photochemsyn »

Herb Gross's ultra-classic old-school chalkboard delivery of "Calculus of Complex Variables, Differential Equations, and Linear Algebra" should not be missed:

https://youtu.be/BOx8LRyr8mU

It turns out he also produced a complete series on the precursor material, "Single Variable Calculus" as well, which I only just now discovered:

https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/res-18-006-calculus-revisited-si...

This professor has a great delivery and a ton of enthusiasm for the subject material, (but you can't just watch it, to absorb it you have to take notes, maybe recreate the examples in Python or something).

Re: Ask HN: What are some of the best university courses available online for free?

#36

Post by Entinel »

phonescreen_man wrote: post #25
jplatzek wrote: post #3

I am quite fond of the three molecular biology courses from MIT on edx [1][2][3]. Not only are the lectures great, but they also have spaced repetition built in. The exercises are often great counterfactual questions that encourage deep understanding. [1] https://www.edx.org/course/molecular-biology-part-1-dna-repl... [2] https://www.edx.org/course/molecular-biology-part-2-transcri... [3] https://www.edx.org/course/m…

Edx should be promoted around the world as the greatest gift the internet delivered!

It was before they sold it to 2U. Such a shame what it has turned into.

Re: Ask HN: What are some of the best university courses available online for free?

#37

Post by criddell »

miketery wrote: post #33

Cryptography I by Dan Boneh. https://www.coursera.org/learn/crypto (note even though it says crypto it is NOT related to blockchain crypto).

It is related, but only in the sense that crypto currencies are built on cryptography primitives.

Re: Ask HN: What are some of the best university courses available online for free?

#38

Post by plaguepilled »

Frederic Schuller's course of Gravity and Light, covering General Relativity. It has a few tactical gaps but it will give you everything you could ever practically need.

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLFeEvEPtX_0S6vxxiiNPrJbLu...

Re: Ask HN: What are some of the best university courses available online for free?

#39

Post by criddell »

I'm looking for a course that uses tools like WinDbg and ETW and memory dumps to diagnose crashes, hangs, etc... It would need to include an introduction to basic assembly language because without that you don't get very far with WinDbg.

I'd like to learn about some of the stuff that Bruce Dawson talks about on his blog: https://randomascii.wordpress.com/

Re: Ask HN: What are some of the best university courses available online for free?

#40

Post by [deleted] »

j_crick wrote: post #17

I really liked The Theoretical Minimum lectures on classical and quantum mechanics by Leonard Susskind (suggestion: google up the guy, he’s cool) at Stanford. You can buy books, but the lectures are all free on YouTube. Classical mechanics playlist can be found here https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL47F408D36D4CF129 and then there’s quantum mechanics available too, should be easily discoverable. And also there’s ju…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN