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Free online CS courses from Udactiy & Coursera starting over the next 2 weeks

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Re: Free online CS courses from Udactiy & Coursera starting over the next 2 weeks

#21

Post by Homunculiheaded »

milesstevenson wrote: post #4

I almost feel as if it isn't fair. My university offers none of these things at the undergraduate level -- compilers isn't even offered at all. Although I am an advocate of this paradigm shift taking place, and am happy to be alive during a time where radical changes to education are surely to be made, these courses being offered make me really have second thoughts about putting all my time towards my university's su…

why not work within the system you're in? At my university a bunch of grad students got together wanting to do ml/pgm/nlp-class, so we put together a small group, added a semester project plus paper presentations to make it worthy of a grad class. It's a bummer that the coursera courses started so late, but otherwise it's working out great. We help each other out and teach each other new stuff, and in the end get credit ;)

If you can't get departmental approval for something like that, then you should at least be able to swing an easily justifiable independent study out of one of the free classes.

Re: Free online CS courses from Udactiy & Coursera starting over the next 2 weeks

#22

Post by milesstevenson »

Homunculiheaded wrote: post #21
milesstevenson wrote: post #4

I almost feel as if it isn't fair. My university offers none of these things at the undergraduate level -- compilers isn't even offered at all. Although I am an advocate of this paradigm shift taking place, and am happy to be alive during a time where radical changes to education are surely to be made, these courses being offered make me really have second thoughts about putting all my time towards my university's su…

why not work within the system you're in? At my university a bunch of grad students got together wanting to do ml/pgm/nlp-class, so we put together a small group, added a semester project plus paper presentations to make it worthy of a grad class. It's a bummer that the coursera courses started so late, but otherwise it's working out great. We help each other out and teach each other new stuff, and in the end get cre…

That's a damn good idea. Gonna ask my advisor about it Monday.

Re: Free online CS courses from Udactiy & Coursera starting over the next 2 weeks

#23

Post by evoxed »

marlek wrote: post #20

Are there any repercussions on choosing more courses and then dropping some after a couple of weeks? I guess it will be hard following more than two with college semester coming to an end, but I like at least 4 or 5 of these online courses and I'd like to see how some of them are going for a few weeks

There are none. I've signed up for everything that looked interesting two months ago and have been active in... 6 of them (counting CS101 that just finished). The rest I'm glad to have registered for since I can still keep up with the materials and lectures without doing the assignments.

Re: Free online CS courses from Udactiy & Coursera starting over the next 2 weeks

#24

Post by spacemanaki »

barfoomoo wrote: post #6

Any opinion on Udacity's compiler classes versus Coursera's? There is a gap of one week between them, so we can try both and choose the one that suits us, but still, any gut feel?

I don't think they are both compilers classes. At many universities there's an undergrad class with "programming languages" in the name (principles of ..., paradigms of ..., etc). Compilers is often a separate, more advanced class, perhaps with the PL class as a prereq. Based on the syllabi the two classes seem to follow this tradition, with the Udacity class being the PL class and Coursera the compilers one.

Re: Free online CS courses from Udactiy & Coursera starting over the next 2 weeks

#26

Post by Mutinix »

melipone wrote: post #25
joshontheweb wrote: post #3

I signed up for the 'build a web browser' class. Sounds like a fun challenge to write a HTML and js parser

Which class is that? udacity or coursera?

Udacity. http://www.udacity.com/overview/Course/cs262

Re: Free online CS courses from Udactiy & Coursera starting over the next 2 weeks

#28

Post by ISloop »

MaxGabriel wrote: post #17

I will also add that if you're finding scheduling conflicts to be a problem with finishing homework, Udacity is offering CS101 and CS373 without homework deadlines. http://www.udacity-forums.com/cs373/questions/34839/we-are-l...

Who grades the homework assignments?

Re: Free online CS courses from Udactiy & Coursera starting over the next 2 weeks

#29

Post by Horace »

One other website that people might find interesting is MITx's program. http://mitx.mit.edu/ So far, I've tried Coursera and Udacity. Udacity: 1. Of the classes I took, only Udacity had programming exercises. For one of my friends, who had never taken programming, the course managed to capture his interest.

Udacity's courseload is:

i: video followed by a short quiz(multiple choice, fill in the blank, etc.) or a programming exercise(Create a function that takes 2 numbers and outputs the bigger one, etc.) There are generally anywhere from 25-40 videos, each 30 seconds to 4 minutes long.

ii: A series of homework assignments. These can be either quizzes or programming tasks. You can submit them, but you don't know whether you got it correct until some deadline, when your homework is graded. THe programming exercises are quite a bit harder.

One of the ones my friend struggled with for a while was a task to build a function that checked whether a sudoku square was valid when entered in a certain format. iii: At the end of each week, there is a time where they have some kind of IRC/audio channel set up, and you can ask them questions live.

2. All the courses are the same quality. Also, they seem to truly have adapted learning into a digital environment, as opposed to certain other places, like MIT's OpenCourseware

Coursera, on the other hand, seems to be a series of lectures that they then overlaid questions on too.

Some teachers' classes are quite obviously just lectures, with some quizzes added on as an afterthought, while other teachers have incorporated them quite nicely. Coursera, my guess is, will also probably have more courses on offer than Udacity soon, since it's a collaboration between several schools.

TLDR: Try them both. I personally prefer Udacity, but there's no harm in signing up for one and then dropping it.

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