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Why My MOOC Is Not Built on Video

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Re: Why My MOOC Is Not Built on Video

#91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN is text based, so it might have a bias towards people who like text.

Agreed. The community is probably biased towards people who are (1) a little bit smarter than average, and so relatively happy to go away and learn things by themselves, and (2) generally more interested in maths, technology and science, which lends itself a little bit more to just "working through the problem sheet" as opposed to, say, the arts and humanities.

> community is probably biased towards people who are (1) a little bit smarter than average

[citation needed]

I agree that on average we're much more willing to learn things ourselves and interested in the subjects you listed, but I reject the idea that the community prefers text content because we're smarter than average. One problem with HN being connected to YC (though it comes with a lot of upsides) is that people will always go out of their way to appear smart. Everyone knows that can help their chances of getting accepted.

Sure, literally everyone that has replied to my original comment has said they're in favor of learning by reading plain text, but the fact is less HN users would have followed along with Sam Altman's "How to Start a Startup" course had it been in that format.

Re: Why My MOOC Is Not Built on Video

#92
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree Grossman's class was much better designed. I think he is a great teacher. But in my opinion it was mostly because the course's notes were very comprehensive in the case of Programming Languages and somewhat poor in Odersky's courses (again: no disrespect meant for Odersky; just my opinion on the design of these online courses). With Grossman's course you can skip the videos entirely and miss nothing, whereas…

For Odersky's class, SICP is available for free on line and in dead-tree form so there was plenty of background material to support the lectures [not to mention the SICP video lectures]. I just found the exercises for Functional Programming in Scala to be drudgery. That wasn't the case in Grossman's class. Odersky's class was full of klunky complexity - SBT, IDE's, and Scala's compiler performance and the warts of wo…

You won't like the exercises in Reactive Programming then. Not only are they a confused mess that is difficult to relate to the source material, the source material itself is confusing and poorly motivated.

PS: SICP is not written either by or for Coursera, or even particularly adapted to it. If you use it as the main supporting material, what is the point of Coursera at all? In contrast, Grossman's notes were written by him and directly support his course.

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