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Ask HN: What's your favorite online course?

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11–20 of 167 posts

Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite online course?

#11
It has been over a year and I haven't finished it yet, but I find it the most interesting. It's Harvard's philosophy course [1]

Also, intro to comp sci by Harvard's open courseware. Without these, I might've dropped out of comp sci in my second year [2]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBdfcR-8hEY [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-OxzIC6pic&list=PLvJoKWRPIu...

Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite online course?

#13

Convex Optimization by Stephen Boyd (Stanford EE364A) available on itunesU. There's also a CVX101 Mooc[1], but I don't how it's different from the original material. IMO it's not the topic itself, but the invaluable material for machine learning, statistics and applied mathematics. And Boyd has such a huge insight on the topic it's always a pleasure to watch his lectures. [1] https://lagunita.stanford.edu/courses/Eng…

Thanks for sharing! On iTunes U are there assignments or other course materials, or just the video lectures? I only see the videos there and I'd like to get my hands dirty practicing assignments and not just watch the lectures.

Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite online course?

#14
CS188.1x Artificial Intelligence by BerkeleyX at edx.org. [1] I took this course back in Spring 2013 and I really enjoy the course project of making an intelligent Pac-Man. :) Through this course, besides learning AI, I also learned Python (before this, I didn't know how to code in Python at all). And with the knowledge from this course, I made a simple connect four game with AI implementation as the player's opponent. [2]

[1] https://www.edx.org/course/artificial-intelligence-uc-berkel...

[2] http://kenrick95.github.io/c4/demo/

Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite online course?

#15
post #6
post #2

https://www.coursera.org/course/rprog - This is the best online course I've taken. Another one I am signed up for and have already done one week of lectures (preview mode) and find very applicable is https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-learn/

Interestingly we get a lot of mixed reviews for R Prog course: https://www.class-central.com/mooc/1713/coursera-r-programmi... Learning how to learn is the best course online that any one can take.

I blogged my experience with learning R here - http://datagrad.blogspot.com/2013/02/the-r-learning-curve.ht...

and with the class here -

http://datagrad.blogspot.com/2013/01/my-most-recent-mooc-exp...

Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite online course?

#17

Convex Optimization by Stephen Boyd (Stanford EE364A) available on itunesU. There's also a CVX101 Mooc[1], but I don't how it's different from the original material. IMO it's not the topic itself, but the invaluable material for machine learning, statistics and applied mathematics. And Boyd has such a huge insight on the topic it's always a pleasure to watch his lectures. [1] https://lagunita.stanford.edu/courses/Eng…

Thanks for sharing! On iTunes U are there assignments or other course materials, or just the video lectures? I only see the videos there and I'd like to get my hands dirty practicing assignments and not just watch the lectures.

Then I suggest the website of the course where you can find homework and lots of material. You can follow the course as if you were enrolled. Also the free pdf copy of the book will certainly be useful.

http://stanford.edu/class/ee364a/index.html http://stanford.edu/~boyd/cvxbook/

Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite online course?

#18
Discrete Optimization https://www.coursera.org/course/optimization -- I really enjoyed this challenging class with a very dynamic teacher, and organized around a set of tough problems that you can tackle using a choice of optimization paradigms (e.g. you can decide to "specialize" in "local search" if you want, and try to solve eveything with it).

Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite online course?

#20
I haven't taken many online courses, but here are my favorites (notice a trend):

Andrew Ng's ML Class - This makes the list because it is incredibly useful. I didn't have much background in the field and this class is a practical survey of ideas. Not a ton of depth, but exposes you to a lot of information gently.

Daphne Koller's PGM Class - This was the most rewarding. I banged my head on a lot of this material, but it was an incredible feeling when things started to click. That I was able to complete this class is a testament to Dr. Koller's excellence as an educator.

Dan Jurafsky's and Christopher Manning's NLP Class - This class was the most fun. I thought the exercises were incredibly well designed. Unlike the first two courses, the exercises were a lot more interesting. For ML and PGM, you mostly know when you have the answer and you are rewarded with 100%. NLP assignments are based on how well your system generalizes, which made me try harder to improve my systems, and helped me enjoy the course.

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