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Coursera to combine with Udemy

investor.coursera.com

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Re: Coursera to combine with Udemy

#211

Post by IshKebab »

shaky-carrousel wrote: post #146
IshKebab wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not in my experience. For example models often say "no you can't do that" now whereas they used to always say you could do things and just hallucinate something if it was impossible. Of course sometimes they say you can't do things when you can (e.g. ChatGPT told me you can't execute commands at the top level of a Makefile a few months ago), but it's definitely less.

> They're just not as egregious.

Uhm yeah, that's what I'm saying. The hallucination situation has improved.

Re: Coursera to combine with Udemy

#212

Post by IshKebab »

nkmnz wrote: post #200
IshKebab wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uhm no? Reading a textbook is obviously not the same as fact checking a textbook.

Parent was writing about a university LECTURE which is different from a TEXTBOOK (which is different from primary sources), so yeah, consulting other sources is checking the facts.

Oh I see what you're saying. It was slightly ambiguous.

But in any case, I didn't read a single textbook at uni; it was all lecture notes provided by the lecturers (fill-in-the-gaps actually which worked waaaay better than you'd think). So the answer is still no - I didn't fact check them and I didn't need to because they didn't wildly hallucinate like AI does.

Re: Coursera to combine with Udemy

#213

Post by SchemaLoad »

dijit wrote: post #151
oceansky wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you give specific examples on lost knowledge?

“why is I/O in docker slow, and how would you improve it” is pretty esoteric knowledge now, but would have been considered basic knowledge (for other applications, not specifically just docker) only 12 years ago. I have had people working who don’t in the slightest understand how a filesystem works, so taking it a step further is impossible. When I tune things I am asked how I know, but everything is just built from…

12 years ago I certainly did not know why a servers IO would be slow, short of just the physical storage was slow. I think you might just be overestimating how much stuff people knew rather than the whole population forgetting how filesystem and IO internals work.

Re: Coursera to combine with Udemy

#214

Post by pests »

edent wrote: post #167
azangru wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Those courses that were basically “we’re a top university and we let someone record the class from the back” were a literal life changer. Honestly, that was all I wanted. Does anyone remember what happened to UC Berkeley? They had a lot of their courses recorded and uploaded to youtube; an absolute joy. Then, some [beep] sued them for not making the recording accessible enough, i.e. not providing captions alongside…

[flagged]

ok Handicapper General

Re: Coursera to combine with Udemy

#215

Post by SamDc73 »

torben-friis wrote: post #27

As someone who had to drop out of school in the 2008 crisis (family trouble), I owe a good chunk of my learning to the first era of online teaching. Those courses that were basically “we’re a top university and we let someone record the class from the back” were a literal life changer. Honestly, that was all I wanted. Everything that came after has been substantially worse. Work is gamified, teachers spend more time…

> If we went back to recording lectures by the worlds best and putting it online for free with attached books and exercises, we could improve the world a lot.

MIT OpenCourseWare still upload a lot of their lectures to YouTube for free (been doing it for decades) and pretty sure some other universities do the same.

The main problem with online courses is lack of "direction" and engagement (which both Udemy and Coursera don't solve)

Re: Coursera to combine with Udemy

#216

Post by SchemaLoad »

nkmnz wrote: post #179
jspann wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 50% of buyers don't even finish the first video. Just wondering - Is that a guess or a backed up statistic? Would be eye opening if that really was the case

I stand corrected! It's 52% that don't even START the first video![0] Other studies report that number at 35%.[1] One thing that's more consistent are average completion rates hovering around 5%. [0] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aav7958 as cited by [1] [1] https://openpraxis.org/articles/606/files/66d16716e6c09.pdf

I think the number is probably a bit skewed by the fact a lot of companies offer unlimited access to udemy and such, so people "start" courses without any commitment or cost, and then predictably drop off fast or don't start at all.

Personally I just found none of them really worth doing. They felt almost not genuine in a way, like they cared more about profiting from courses and gaming the system than actually teaching you something. I switched to learning via Youtube videos and found it much more educational than the paid courses.

Re: Coursera to combine with Udemy

#217

Post by SamDc73 »

karel-3d wrote: post #63

Coursera courses used to be good when I still had time to do courses, while udemy was very trashy low effort for my tastes. I am surprised Coursera became as bad as everyone says, I kind of refuse to believe it. But I don't have any spare time right now to study stuff edit: omg I just looked at coursera and it's so bad! it's all "AI this" "AI that" who uses all that stuff? who wants that? the whole site looks so sad…

Honestly, I feel like it's easy to filter out good/bad courses on Coursera by stuff like University name (although gotta admit last time did a course there were 3 years ago)

Re: Coursera to combine with Udemy

#218

Post by SamDc73 »

andrewrn wrote: post #190

As a counterpoint to the negativity in here. I purchased one of Angela Yu's basic webdev courses a couple years back and it springboarded my coding ability. I left it rather quickly to just build random stuff I wanted, but still, it was the spark.

Angela Yu course is good, told my brother about it and he had hard time figuring some stuff out cause some pieces were outdated (he has zero experience)

Re: Coursera to combine with Udemy

#219

Post by znpy »

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…

> but it's gotten so bad that it seems like more and more people react with "how do you know so much?"

I had very similar experiences. I had some incredibly wild "successes" in fixing some company systems even though I had just joined the company and I was not familiar with such systems prior to joining.

My "secret" is that I just read the service's documentation (the fine manual) and did what the documentation described.

It's wild how some people's nowadays go around and around mindlessly trying stuff that the LLM of the day suggested, without actually learn enough to *reason* about internals of services and systems.

Re: Coursera to combine with Udemy

#220

Post by swores »

gustavopezzi wrote: post #112
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…

I also started teaching on Udemy in 2019 and even though the number of students was high, I quickly noticed that income was low and most enrolled students did not even start the courses they purchased (let alone complete them). I also decided to invest time and money in my own website/school and that was probably the best decision I've ever made. Also, I'm not sure most people know that Udemy was never profitable up…

> "I also decided to invest time and money in my own website/school and that was probably the best decision I've ever made."

Thanks for not jumping to self promotion, but I'm actually curious to see how you did it - would you mind sharing a link?

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