81–90 of 395 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Considering hallucinations, that seems risky. How do you double check what you were taught?
The same way you double check with any other method you prefer? Duh. LLMs are vastly superior to compile and spread knowledge than any other thing preceding them.
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 ranked or promoted by Udemy, for years.
I have no evidence of this but my personal opinion is their ranking is probably not fully automated and they have special offers and deals with certain instructors and if you're not a part of this club, oh well.
Again, it's all speculation but I can only go by what my numbers are. They were small scale life changing and now nothing but the quality of the courses I produced didn't change. It doesn't make sense. Of course it could be one big coincidence too, but this has been tracked and analyzed over years.
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. How is that a viable model?
Anyway, in this case, the cost to the university is quite low and there's no real loss of income, as the real value the vast majority of people pay for is clearly in the status that comes from being there in person and getting the diploma.
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…
The instructor is really passionnate about what she's talking about, which really makes the subject more interesting than I thought it would be.
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.
Most drawing/painting courses are taught from people who are juniors at best. The quality is laughable compared to what you can get for free from Marco Bucci/Sinix/Proko channels. And honestly, even those high-quality videos won't teach you how to draw anyway.
That being said, I didn't realize how bad Udemy art courses were when I got started. I think that's a life lesson for me especially in the era of LLM.
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.
The reality is that most of these courses exist for the certificate not the course material. People still job hunting for entry level roles just want to pad out their LinkedIn.
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…
This seemed inevitable, no? I’d love to see long term usage data on MOOCs. They had so much promise though I don’t know anyone who uses them post-LLM though it could be I live in a bubble.
LLMs typically still require some interactivity, no? Much easier to watch some videos in many cases.
The best Elearning platform I've found is mathacademy. no videos. just short texts on how to solve a problem and then a bunch of problems with increasing difficulty. much more efficent if you want to actually learn a skill.
TLDR: you learn by DOING