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Ask HN: Did you take any fresh MOOCs as of 2020?

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Re: Ask HN: Did you take any fresh MOOCs as of 2020?

#81
post #10

MIT's 6.824: Distributed Systems (taught by Robert Morris) is completely open and available online, and it includes video lectures, notes, readings, and programming assignments from as recent as Spring 2020 (including half of the lectures recorded from home as the pandemic strikes). The assignments even include auto-graded testing scripts, so you can verify your solution to the assignments. It's not necessarily a MOO…

This course is incredible. If anyone who had a hand in putting it together is reading, they have my thanks for putting out such an incredible course. I've done 2 labs and 5-6 lectures of this course so far and I find it absolutely worth it. I just wish I were a bit more disciplined about it (the pandemic made a lot of things harder for me). My goal is to eventually finish it and then make my own version of the Distri…

Oooh me me!

I want to do this in rust. Hit me up on twitter. Same user ID.

Re: Ask HN: Did you take any fresh MOOCs as of 2020?

#82

Ideally we'll get to a point where there is a really well produced course on everything such that new courses will only be required for entirely new fields. I was commenting to a friend the other day that it's insane that we hire 1000s of teachers to teach roughly the same math class 2x per year for 40 years. Instead I'd rather a fraction of those make a truly fantastic video course and then the remaining fraction co…

As a former teacher, I 100% agree with you. Whenever I was explaining the same stuff 4 times in a row in 4 different classes, I thought "this would be so much more efficient with video". With the advantage that sick kids that stayed at home could watch the video, too. Or anyone who didn't pay attention could watch the video again before exams. And their parents could watch the video too, if they are curious.

And if more teachers would do it like this, and they would put their videos online, it means that if your teacher's explanation didn't work for you, for whatever reason, you can try another one. Having the same thing explained from 2 or 3 different angles would probably help.

The usual response is: "Teacher's job isn't just explaining; it's also making sure the kids understood properly, explaining questions, giving problems, checking the answers to the problems, etc." Yeah, so we could have 1/2 of the lesson on video, and another 1/2 solving problems and answering questions. Still an improvement over how things are done now. And a part of "giving problems, checking solution" could be done by a computer, by the way.

The part of the response I agree with, is that you cannot eliminate the helpers completely. No matter how well the videos would explain it, some students would misunderstand it creatively, and if there is no one to notice and fix the problem, the outcomes will be bad for a fraction of students. Also, for kids, someone needs to be there to make sure they actually watch the videos, and don't play with their phones during the lesson instead.

Khan Academy is fantastic! My daughter loves it, but she also sometimes gets stuck on a lesson, and needs to ask me. In principle, this could be solved by collecting feedback, and creating optional extra slow explanations for people who got stuck at some point. Like: if you didn't understand the short video, watch this long one.

The way we do teaching now is just... dunno, pretending that we live in 19th century and can't do better. It still works, but has a lot of problems. For example, if your teacher sucks, and you can't change schools easily, you are screwed; and I have heard stories about incompetent teachers.

(Also, all textbooks for elementary and high school should be open-source, and freely downloadable from one web page. With the option for volunteers to fix mistakes, add more explanations, make translations, etc.)

Re: Ask HN: Did you take any fresh MOOCs as of 2020?

#83

I got to help teach one! This answer doesn't answer the question that was prompted, but I volunteered for Stanford's Code in Place (introductory CS) and it was kind of amazing getting to be on the other side of the MOOC experience as a TA. I lead 5 assigned class sessions with a small group of people (never more than 10) and held 5 other office hour style sessions as well. It was a really rewarding experience and I t…

The google results for that are pretty sparse - what are the criteria to be eligible to volunteer?

They just asked for people to volunteer. The filtering was done based upon a small recorded video of you answering 2 small coding challenges and teaching the solution.

Re: Ask HN: Did you take any fresh MOOCs as of 2020?

#84
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. One of the best courses i had taken on Coursera was the Algorithms series by Robert Sedgewick. Apart from going through the lectures, i had obtained a great satisfaction from solving the assignments. But this year, i have taken up the lab assignments for the following: https://cs144.github.io/ https://tc.gts3.org/cs3210/2020/spring/info.html Both have been recommended earlier on HN. Next on my list is 6.824

I started that course, by my God his presentation is so...sleep-inducing for me. Contrast this with Peter Norvig, who is engaging and scintillates with passion about the subject. By contrast, Sedgewick has this smirk on the whole time, and talks in a monotone. His content is first rate, of course, but sheesh, he's got to work on that pedagogy!

speed it up 1.5x and its fine

Re: Ask HN: Did you take any fresh MOOCs as of 2020?

#85
If you want University level courses, then here are few links:

CS Video courses: https://github.com/Developer-Y/cs-video-courses

Math/Science video courses: https://github.com/Developer-Y/math-science-video-lectures

Some of Electrical/Mechanical engineering courses: https://github.com/Developer-Y/engineering-video-courses

If you don't have problem understanding Indian accent, India's NPTEL publishes University level courses on this site: https://nptel.ac.in/course.html

You can take Indian IIT courses online with assignments (and proctored exams if you are in India) at following site: https://swayam.gov.in/

Re: Ask HN: Did you take any fresh MOOCs as of 2020?

#86
I'm currently taking one called Moral Foundations of Politics (https://www.coursera.org/learn/moral-politics) with my girlfriend. Netflix became a staple of many lockdown evenings and we thought we'd sprinkle in something a bit more engaging (and unrelated to our work).

Re: Ask HN: Did you take any fresh MOOCs as of 2020?

#87
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, essentially what I was asking is "is there any good new stuff or is this movement dead", meaning the 2012ish hype of open university knowledge, so I don't think it's a question of a recurring nature. Most of the replies here are more suitable to "what are good moocs", which is fine and what I more or less expected anyway. As to regularly resubmitted post, this kind of touches the issues I asked. If there aren't…

> is there any good new stuff or is this movement dead There might be some good content, but the movement is definitely dead. Sebastian Thrun / udacity never actually delivered. You still need to get a bachelor's degree by a regular university to get into oms-cs. Sad.

> You still need to get a bachelor's degree by a regular university to get into oms-cs

I feel like this is absolutely not the case. For software development and adjacent fields (UX/UI design, 2/3D graphics, editing, ...) you definitely need the skills and the degree is a benefit (a door opener) but not a necessity.

That said, if you expected a coursera course to replace a university, you'd first have to deliver on reducing the amount of people who cheat (i.e increasing the prestige of the degree). Nowadays, many IT professionals don't even know what CCNA, AWS CSAP, or RHCSA mean (and all of those are somewhat prestigious in the IT field)

The idea of getting online certificates instead of degrees is dead. The idea evolved into learning skills instead of gathering certificates, and demonstrating your skills. Think Pluralsight, LinkedIn Learning, or LinuxAcademy, which are very much alive and kicking.

Re: Ask HN: Did you take any fresh MOOCs as of 2020?

#88
post #10

MIT's 6.824: Distributed Systems (taught by Robert Morris) is completely open and available online, and it includes video lectures, notes, readings, and programming assignments from as recent as Spring 2020 (including half of the lectures recorded from home as the pandemic strikes). The assignments even include auto-graded testing scripts, so you can verify your solution to the assignments. It's not necessarily a MOO…

It's a great course but am I the only one a bit annoyed for the amount of questions during the lectures? I noticed by looking at the schedule many of the lectures don't cover all the material they are supposed to. He runs out of time.

Re: Ask HN: Did you take any fresh MOOCs as of 2020?

#89
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PSIA yeah

Cool! I didn’t realize they require you to know that stuff. But it’s great to know that. Mountain and Avalanche training should be a requirement for PSIA.

Oh they don't. I am just doing it for my own benefit.
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