I also have a yearly training budget at work that I've never gotten around to using. If you had a yearly training budget what would you use it for?
Ask HN: best courses free or otherwise
1–10 of 12 posts
Re: Ask HN: best courses free or otherwise
#2Re: Ask HN: best courses free or otherwise
#3"The Teaching Company" has rebranded to "The Great Courses" and they produce uniformly great product. Your local public library probably has shelves of their physical products under both names, probably. Mine has more than one bookcase of audiobooks and also the dvd form of some lectures. How you interpret "fair use" once you get your mitts on physical media is your own dilemma. Somehow I got on their mailing list and all I can say is never pay retail, because just like a department store, in a rotation pattern, 25% of the store is on sale for 90% off at any given time. I'm told their products are available to Audible subscribers, but not being an audible subscriber I don't know. I have probably listened to dozens of their courses over the last few decades and never been disappointed.
There are a surprising number of courses only available officially on itunes. Bulliet's "History of Iran" from Columbia U is beyond excellent, I listened to it a couple years ago and I don't remember how I "cracked it" such that my android podcast player had access, I remember it was a huge PITA but worth the effort.
Must be nice to have a training budget. Those disappeared from all my F500 sized megacorp employers in the 90s. Back when we had them, they were awesome. Right around the time those budgets disappeared, we mostly bought subscriptions to the new "Safari" service which was very interesting reading.
Re: Ask HN: best courses free or otherwise
#4Coursera
If someone would rip the videos off Coursera, strip out the unneeded video, concatenate, and upload to archive.org it could work out pretty well.
Re: Ask HN: best courses free or otherwise
#5Coursera
Re: Ask HN: best courses free or otherwise
#6Coursera
I've completed one course (why I bothered I don't know) and I've subscribed to and watched all the videos of a couple courses, and they have an absolute fixation on video even when its completely unnecessary, the videos tend to be very short, and have constant quiz interruptions. So its not going to fly as something you consume while doing something else, like driving or riding a bike or yardwork or shoveling snow or…
Re: Ask HN: best courses free or otherwise
#7I may not agree with everything but it’s a nice refresher and it’s certainly the kind of course that more people should take; not enough people know enough about the food they put in their mouths.
[1] https://www.edx.org/course/mcgillx/mcgillx-chem181x-food-tho...
Re: Ask HN: best courses free or otherwise
#8Re: Ask HN: best courses free or otherwise
#9Peter Singer - arguably (not that I want an argument) the most important philosopher of the past forty years - will be teaching Practical Ethics on Coursera. https://www.coursera.org/course/practicalethics
Re: Ask HN: best courses free or otherwise
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've completed one course (why I bothered I don't know) and I've subscribed to and watched all the videos of a couple courses, and they have an absolute fixation on video even when its completely unnecessary, the videos tend to be very short, and have constant quiz interruptions. So its not going to fly as something you consume while doing something else, like driving or riding a bike or yardwork or shoveling snow or…
Thanks, that is very helpful. I like to listen to courses while I'm making breakfast in the morning. A bunch of quizzes would be quite annoying.