131–140 of 320 posts
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massive_open_online_course
I've been wanting to learn how to sketch. Has anyone taken on of the drawing courses and successfully brought their skill level up from nothing to being able to do recognizable drawings?
This is pretty good material for fundamentals. I used it myself to learn.
I've taken 10 GaTech OMSCS courses via Udacity. Two of my favorites (so far): Intro to Computer Vision: https://www.udacity.com/course/introduction-to-computer-visi... Reinforcement Learning: https://www.udacity.com/course/reinforcement-learning--ud600 I found the Isbell+Littman combo to work so well that I also took the ML course. I know some people complain about their humor but it was perfect for me. I could liste…
As for Isbell+Littman... while their lectures may be more jovial, I wouldn't say they were as effective in learning. I hated the videos tbh. For ML, I found my learning consisted of watching other available videos on the web. Including institutions like CMU, UW, Stanford, and YouTube.
Most fun: Pat Pattison, Songwriting, Coursera. Very good lectures, very good material, very well presented. Teaches a lot about writing song lyrics in just 6 weeks, breaks it nicely down to steps and recipes. I used to think that the best feature of MOOCs is the automatic grading and feedback from programming homework, but in this course, for the homework songwriting you gave and got feedback from 3-5 random people i…
It's good to hear that this MOOC is still so well thought of since I first took it; for me, it was the first course I took that made me really understand how a neural network and back prop actually worked.
When I took the course, it was in 2011 - and was known as "ML Class"; yep - I was among the first "beta tester guinea pigs" of the course. It was fun and amazing to participate in.
One of the early participants was even inspired to replicate CMU's ALVINN self-driving vehicle in miniature:
Nand2Tetris was my favorite. I can't say the information (particularly the first half) has much practical application for me, but it was a lot of fun and deepened my understanding of what's going on at a low level. Homework is very well designed with a simulator you download to test your work on, then submit for automatic grading. Udacity's Differential Equations course was pretty awesome too. I had taken Calculus pr…
Yes! Nand2Tetris came about before "MOOC" was even coined. It's a great course where you start building simple circuits in a hardware simulator, and eventually build a working Tetris game -- on hardware you built (running in a simulator), in an OS you wrote.
Highly, highly recommend it.
This is going to be one of those threads that I'll upvote and bookmark and then not revisit till years later. Any idea on how to start setting aside time to take a MOOC? For those of you taking a MOOC, how do you structure your week? It's been years since I've been in college.
It was mostly by working till late at night.
It helped to start on new lectures and assignments early in the week given unpredictability of time slots available for studying. Once in a while, I was late in submitting assignments, losing a few points but managing to get A grades still.
Watching the videos at double speed was a boon. I could not have completed the courses without that. Only when I was unable to follow would I rewind and watch the segments at 1x or 1.25x speeds. The technology for speeding up sound along with the video had just come, I felt so lucky for this. Only two courses where I was not able to speed through were those which were completely outside of my domain (Economics and Human Physiology).
I never went through the optional book recommendations, if any. When the subject matter was not explained well enough in the lectures, forums typically supplied the answers within 24 hours of the lecture.
In one of the courses (Compilers), I stopped doing the assignments in the middle as they were requiring a lot of time while not adding a matching value.
Best course so far: AI from BerkeleyX Other great courses: Learning to Learn, Irrational Psychology by Dan Ariely, and Algorithms by Sedgewick Can someone recommend a good way to work with other students on MOOCs? I've taken many courses, but they aren't much better than just reading the textbook and working on a personal project, although the curation of content is valuable. The relationship aspect is sorely missing…
Is MOOC a commonly used term? I don't believe I've ever seen it before this post. Based on context, the default Wikipedia redirect [1] for it seems correct, but I'm surprised I never knew that concept had a name (and an acronym at that). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massive_open_online_course
There was a gamification mooc taught by Kevin Webach (Wharton) that was excellent, too.
Chuck Eesley's first tech-entrepreneur mooc was ground breaking (it led to the spinoff of NovoEd).
The last mooc I actually completed was one for contract law, offered by harvardx. It gives a nice, high-level overview of the subject-- good enough for my needs/interests.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Jennifer Widom, Databases, Stanford. This is not the flashiest of a topic, but oh boy was it well organized. Couldn't agree more. I took this course in 2011 but didn't have a need for working with databases until 2014. Three years after I took the course I was able to jump in and work fluently on databases -- Mongo, Sqlite, Firebase, etc. The least I can say is the course helped me internalize database concepts. Th…
Ditto. I was able to get my foot in the door of industry due to this course and Scott Allen's PluralSight C# courses. I've now built 2 data warehouses and helped with maintenance on another. It's not my main focus, but it's nice to be able to do it myself when the work calls for it. I got hired at my first job out of college due to the C# ones and I've been working in C# since then, with a smattering of other languag…