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Coursera to combine with Udemy

investor.coursera.com

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Re: Coursera to combine with Udemy

#141

Post by IshKebab »

shaky-carrousel wrote: post #91
boltzmann_ wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hallucinations has made huge progress over last 3 years

Yep, now there are way more sophisticated. Same amount, though.

Nah they have definitely reduced massively. I suspect that's just because as models get more powerful their answers are just more likely to be true rather than hallucinations.

I don't think anyone has found any new techniques to prevent them. But maybe we don't need that anyway if models just get so good that they naturally don't hallucinate much.

Re: Coursera to combine with Udemy

#142

Post by [deleted] »

robotresearcher wrote: post #70
sharadov wrote: post #35

Both have garbage content at this point - Coursera was great when they launched, top quality material and university-level instruction. Now it's just bottom of the barrel scraps. YT has tons of quality instruction - hell nowadays I just ask an LLM to make me a course for whatever I wanna learn.

I tried that out in my field of expertise, to calibrate my expectations. ChatGPT invented multiple references to non-existent but plausibly-titled papers written by me . I think of that when asking questions about areas I don’t know. That was about 18mo ago, so maybe this kind of hallucination is under control these days.

[deleted]

Re: Coursera to combine with Udemy

#144

Post by ghaff »

bluGill wrote: post #128
ghaff wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You need forced exercises, you need grading, you need something of a schedule. Not to say people can't do it. But, especially for difficult material, even a lot of motivated people won't. I mean I remember what undergrad (and grad school) was like and I'm pretty sure doing that independently and optionally would be tough.

Just look at success for adults learning the things adults commonly take up: languages or musical instruments. There is some good results, but mostly you find people who can say "Hello, how are you" and no more; or they can play some simple songs but nothing major. It takes hours and hours of practice / study time to learn anything hard. You can find a lot of community ed classes that will bring you to about that lev…

I agree.

There are a lot of activities that you can get the basics of pretty quickly given some natural abilities/talents/interest.

But most adults won't have the time or inclination to spend hundreds of hours (and probably money) on often rather boring exercises to reach the next level of an activity like playing an instrument.

Re: Coursera to combine with Udemy

#145

Post by n8cpdx »

criddell wrote: post #37

What are the best online courses you’ve taken? On Coursera, I did Andrew Ng’s machine learning course and Dan Boneh’s cryptography course and both were excellent. Time well spent IMHO. The next thing I want to take is a WinDbg course. Udemy has one that looks pretty good. I should probably also find a modern assembly language course…

I did a computer graphics course on EdX: https://www.edx.org/learn/computer-graphics/the-university-o...

Objectively the quality of the production was pretty mediocre, but the assignments were challenging and I learned a lot. Similar to a real course taught by a professor. The final assignment (ray tracing) only asked for render results so I took it as an opportunity to learn rust.

The content was maybe a little outdated, but I think the concepts haven’t changed much and that’s what I was there for.

Course materials were updated for M1 macs, but there was a little friction in figuring things out.

I plan to take the follow up soon.

Re: Coursera to combine with Udemy

#146

Post by shaky-carrousel »

IshKebab wrote: post #141
shaky-carrousel wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, now there are way more sophisticated. Same amount, though.

Nah they have definitely reduced massively. I suspect that's just because as models get more powerful their answers are just more likely to be true rather than hallucinations. I don't think anyone has found any new techniques to prevent them. But maybe we don't need that anyway if models just get so good that they naturally don't hallucinate much.

That's because they're harder to spot, not because there are less. In my field I still see the same amount. They're just not as egregious.

Re: Coursera to combine with Udemy

#147

Post by codezero »

nickjj wrote: post #83

I was a Udemy instructor for ~10 years selling tech courses but focused more on delivering courses through my own site for the last ~5-6 years. Something never felt right with how Udemy promoted courses. I used to have a top selling course there, selling thousands of copies a month and now it gets basically no sales but it's still one of the highest rated courses in that niche on their platform. It's just no longer r…

Not sure if anecdata helps but when I worked at Quora udemy course link spam was one of the higher volume sources of spam. It’s possible other courses are doing better because they pay people to link spam.

Re: Coursera to combine with Udemy

#148

Post by oceansky »

ravenstine wrote: post #135
nickjj wrote: post #83

I was a Udemy instructor for ~10 years selling tech courses but focused more on delivering courses through my own site for the last ~5-6 years. Something never felt right with how Udemy promoted courses. I used to have a top selling course there, selling thousands of copies a month and now it gets basically no sales but it's still one of the highest rated courses in that niche on their platform. It's just no longer r…

Modern society totally devalues anything considered even slightly old. I used to notice it as a real lack of intergenerational knowledge transfer, but it's gotten so bad that it seems like more and more people react with "how do you know so much?" and "why would you do that?" over very basic knowledge that isn't even that old. For all the reading the average person claims to do, they sure don't seem to know very much…

Can you give specific examples on lost knowledge?

Re: Coursera to combine with Udemy

#149

Post by tompark »

synergy20 wrote: post #18

I bought quite a few courses at udemy, none at coursera though, but I ended up not taking them, instead I used youtube to get some video, and LLM to get the text context these days. Youtube is the true gem, if it spins out of google it could take on netflix at least. In short, google might be undervalued a lot just because of youtube, for entertainment and education purposes.

After Coursera/Udacity/EdX discontinued courses that I wanted to take, or removed access to ones I only partially completed, I switched to buying classes on Udemy. I completed only a handful of many purchases, and the quality level was okay-to-mediocre but better than nothing, so I got more value out of Udemy than Coursera.

I also found that Youtube videos are just as informative as Udemy classes, but they're not always as well structured.

The MOOCs had some pretty cool/interesting university classes that don't exist anywhere else. It's a shame those videos weren't preserved where we can access/purchase them without attending the college.

Re: Coursera to combine with Udemy

#150

Post by belter »

ghshephard wrote: post #61
stef25 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For a basic crash course in Python, is there anything better than the top rated Udemy course, can YT offer something better ? I really don't mind paying the 12$ it costs on Udemy.

You will never do better than https://www.pythonmorsels.com/ This is what you get when you have an educator completely dedicated to a single topic and surpasses all expectations of education.

Terrible audio quality...
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