71–80 of 106 posts
I was in the very first cohort of this program. I loved it but had to drop for personal/family reasons after finishing three courses. Someday I'd love to jump back in! I highly recommend it to anyone who might be interested.
I was also in the first cohort. Graduated in 2016. Transformed my career. 100% would recommend.
I really can't imagine that these online degrees have any real value in the modern world of LLM-assited coding - there's no way anyone looking at a resume would think such institutional online degrees still have any value. Perhaps there is some educational value for the student, but even there the only real value is the organizational structure - you might as well form an online study group on discord for free, and g…
The best two classes are AOS and HPC imo. Very grateful to Profs Ramachandran and Vuduc
AOS (and its prerequisite) gives a really strong foundation for working on infrastructure.
HPC pushed me farther than any other class I've done, it's very unique, helped me land my current gig
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Is this a common thing to have at university? I'm from one of top universities in Poland; our database courses never included anything more than basic SQL where cursors were the absolute end. Even at Masters.
Yes. It is. Your database course was apparently broken.
My specialisation was databases there.
...
Do not worry, I do not work with databases in professional life as my main aspect. But I was not given a comprehensive education, and not even once there was a focus on anything more in depth. I came out without even knowing how databases work inside.
Naturally, I know what I could do - read a good book or go through open source projects, like Sqlite. But that knowledge was not was my uni gave me...
I am jealous of American/Canadian unis in this aspect.
In the past they made videos available via Udacity, which were removed after Udacity turned their focus to short & easy (which often means superficial) courses for enterprise training instead of "serious" university courses. I guess that was not a viable business. Of course they did not come with any assignments, just like these courses. Can't blame them, but other universities offer much resources -- for the same to…
In the past they made videos available via Udacity, which were removed after Udacity turned their focus to short & easy (which often means superficial) courses for enterprise training instead of "serious" university courses. I guess that was not a viable business. Of course they did not come with any assignments, just like these courses. Can't blame them, but other universities offer much resources -- for the same to…
I was the head of enterprise curriculum in 2018 and an OMSCS grad in 2016. This was a weird time to work for Udacity and the company went thru a major shakeup in 2019. The “breakup” with GT happened before the focus on enterprise and the enterprise focus was somewhat short-lived as the CEO was replaced just as enterprise was ascending as the primary revenue stream. COVID was rough for Udacity, and content production…
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I completed OMSCS with 2 kids (both preschool), taking 1 class per semester from Fall 2019 to Spring 2023. It was possible thanks to having full remote job and a very supportive wife. I learned a lot, but I probably wouldn't do it again, it was extremely unhealthy, especially for certain classes like Distributed Computing (CS7210).
Why was it extremely unhealthy? The work load? The lack of sleep with work, kids, and school? Asking because I’m sorta in the same position
CS7210 (DC) is the hardest class I took. We had to write a correct Paxos implementation, then use it to build a distributed sharded KV store. I remember having to spend 10+ hours on a single day during weekend. It was worth it though, learned a lot about distributed consensus, and how difficult it is to get right (there were test failures that were fixed after hours of debug, and the fix was literally changing the order of some code lol).
In the past they made videos available via Udacity, which were removed after Udacity turned their focus to short & easy (which often means superficial) courses for enterprise training instead of "serious" university courses. I guess that was not a viable business. Of course they did not come with any assignments, just like these courses. Can't blame them, but other universities offer much resources -- for the same to…
What are some of the best university CS or engineering courses offered openly, with assignments, in this way that aren’t from MIT or Stanford?
Princeton used to offer algorithm courses on Coursera with full assignments including auto grading, I don't know if that's still the case.
I don't know enough about (or have time to learn) other offerings, but I am sure there are a few more out there. Class central should be a good place to discover those courses.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What are some of the best university CS or engineering courses offered openly, with assignments, in this way that aren’t from MIT or Stanford?
CMU's database courses are a famous example: https://15445.courses.cs.cmu.edu/fall2025/ Princeton used to offer algorithm courses on Coursera with full assignments including auto grading, I don't know if that's still the case. I don't know enough about (or have time to learn) other offerings, but I am sure there are a few more out there. Class central should be a good place to discover those courses.
I don’t view class central as being useful, could really use much more detailed filtering of results.