I'm a sysadmin/developer/devops-guy, but despite "knowing" Docker I had a lot of fun going through this course, once I'd completed it I found I'd learned a few useful things, and my understanding was much more comprehensive:
My first time doing online-learning, and registering for the university, but now I've done it I'm gonna work my way through a few more of the courses.
(You don't need to register, you can just start reading/completing the exercises, and use the telegraph chat-group for help. Mixture of English and Finnish, if you ask questions in English people will use that happily. You only need register if you want official credits, which might be useful in the future for me, but probably not people outside the country)
I've taken the Udacity Flying Car nanodegree recently (during their free month promotion). It's from 2018.
Plusses:
* neat environment to work with: there's a drone and plane simulator based on Unity3D's Unity Player and NVIDIA PhysX that you connect to from Python, as well as another full simulator implemented with OpenGL (in C++).
* Considerable ground covered: representation, path planning, drone control, estimation, even basics of sensor fusing. Optionally, you can implement a full autopilot for a fixed wing plane.
Neutral:
* All the boilerplate code is provided (Python, C++), and you're asked to fill in the blanks here and there. So, one avoids a lot of hassle. On the other hand, you know, the instructions say "Compute the new variance matrix after the transition using the formula \Sigma_t = G \Sigma_{t-1} GˆT + Q", and then you plug in the line
ekfCov = G * ekfCov * G.transpose() + Q;
Minuses:
* quite some mistakes. The course seems to get little love and few updates or bug fixes. If I had paid for it, I'd be miffed.
* not too much going on in the chat and discussion forum.
As to your points:
1. more "vocational" courses: Yes. Some of it seems more or less designed to quickly train the next generation of code monkeys.
2. paid model: Absolutely. Without the COVID-19 free month, this would have cost EUR 400 per month. Steep.
3. anytime you want: Agreed, the social element was pretty thin. I had the one month deadline before the billing would kick in, so that was useful for self-motivation.
4. more variety: yes, hard to identify good ones, particularly in combination with #2 (pay to study).
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 could be hands on helpers/instructors for those who need help. This is kind of khan academy, but I'd like to see that happen in the public school system.
Just finished "Model Thinking" [1] taught by Scott E. Page.
I really enjoyed this class. It provided me with several very useful mathematical tools to think more clearly about important and frequent problems. Scott is a great teacher.
I agree with your assessment. Most of the MOOC websites have shifted to being much less academic, more applied and are pushing paid credentials. It doesn't seem like most of the top universities are creating much new content for Coursera or Edx compared to 2013.
I mostly use MIT open courseware for self learning. A lot of course websites are also online and if I hear about an interesting course at some University I'll just google the course number. Stanford online and MIT ocw have a lot of lectures on their YouTube channels and I've found some interesting lectures just searching YouTube for a topic. When I wanted assignments and lectures for Russell and Norvig's AI textbook, I googled "Russell AI course" and stumbled on Berkeley's AI course. I've been enjoying it.
How has the social aspect + taking the course with others helped you in the past? I never found it that important. But I have always preferred self learning even in college.
I don't think you can call it mind-expanding or intellectually stimulating, but I'm currently following the MOOC about modern Web Development from the University of Helsinki https://fullstackopen.com/.
I think it's quite solid and valuable, has a good amount of exercises and I really like the frameworks/technologies they teach (React/Express/TypeScript/GraphQL).
Also trying to expand on my own the topics and concepts they introduce, so I think at the end it's gonna be a very good long-time investment.
For more specific stuff like Algorithms and Data Structures or Programming Languages knowledge, I usually prefer books over MOOCs.
I agree with you. I once followed OCW to learn stuff. Then it evolved into edx. I remember taking Anant Agarwal's EE course sequence and found it wonderful. Notable courses were always from MIT on edx. But now in the last year I have found edx to have SO MANY courses, like you said the microsoft technologies (which I found a bit shallow and unnecessarily split into a lot of courses) it becomes confusing and exhausting trying to find something. In addition, edx has become a paid model where you lose access after a couple of weeks, and you usually don't have access to assignments even when you audit now.
I have let go of edx and moocs and now fish for online university courses which are put up on their websites. Notable ones are MIT, UCB, UC (davis/san diego i don't remember, but one of them puts up all videos as podcasts), CMU (some videos), Brown, etc. Then you have top profs putting up stuff online, like Sedgewick, Pavlo, etc. Personally I feel this is the way forward, pick and choose courses online directly from universities, instead of mooc platforms, for each subject. There is this github repo - https://github.com/prakhar1989/awesome-courses/blob/master/R... which lists out a lot of courses. Occasionally, if you browse enough, you might find some rare links like these courses on database systems - https://bigdata.uni-saarland.de/datenbankenlernen/ and https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCDIJAkbAr53I4fggNsbzdrA/pla...
Discrete Optimization by Pascal van Hentenryck on Coursera. Fun class with great professor. Highly recommended if you’re interested in the subject.
I'm taking the Micromasters in Statistics and Data Science from MIT. It's awesome and now I want to continue studying and probably get my masters after this. It's very rigorous though. I'm not doing this for job prospects. I already work as a data analyst. I'm looking forward to learning the theoretical aspects of the mathematics and of course its applications.
MIT has consistently high quality MOOCs. Here's a new philosophy course on edX (offered for the first time this year) https://www.edx.org/course/moral-problems-and-the-good-life
Didn't take it myself and still quite hands-on, but Execute Program seems a cool way to learn new things:
https://www.executeprogram.com/
Also, Dan Boneh had a YouTube thing up a few months ago where he said that Cryptography II would be coming to Coursera this year, so that will be interesting too.
Meta: I have had the same question as well and I'm sure that I will have it again in six months. IMO this submission has potential to be a regularly re-submitted post like 'Who is hiring?'.
I took the deeplearning specialisation on Coursera by Andrew Ng. The first two courses were good, but after that the quality of the content quickly deteriorated. Video lectures were not properly edited, you could see Andrew repeating his lines over and over again, which should have been taken out in post. Programming exercises felt like fill-in-the-blanks and the libraries used were severely outdated. Thank God it was paid for by my institution.
I took https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/the-mind-is-flat and it was great. Loved the book and the course was a great complement. The platform is nothing to write home about but the course itself was so good it didn't matter at all.
Stanford CS193p: SwiftUI iOS App Development. Been meaning to get into iOS dev for a while, but it’s frustrating because learning resources outdate so fast. This course is new though (as in ~2 months) and only teaches current stuff. (Just need to finish it before everything moves on to Xcode 12...)
I am hoping to train more for my ski instructor certification this year.
But i am doing 'mountains 101' during the pandemic https://www.coursera.org/learn/mountains-101
Not sure if it's a new one, but I'm liking https://www.coursera.org/learn/financial-markets-global thus far.
I am currently doing CS193p [0] (Developing Apps for iOS) from Stanford.
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 think a lot of people who can volunteer for it should consider doing so if Code in Place continues.
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/
Side note: With Corona and the rise of biotechnology, I hope we'll see some excellent courses in natural / hard science in the near future. I'd love to switch into the SynBio industry, but lack the willingness for another university degree. I also strongly prefer remote learning over onsite lectures. Of course, you'd need some onside presence for lab work. That's the tricky and costly part. Still, if the future is bio, then demand will skyrocket.
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).
Does anyone know any good introductory/intermediate neuroscience MOOCs? My favorite one by Henry Lester got deleted off Coursera unfortunately.
Yes! Signed up to 6 courses. Never started any of them. I'm going back to learning by doing and a few paper books.
Any good courses on python and building rest APIs with Django? Out anything really, looking to up my Python skills
Took the fast.ai course
Deeplearning.ai regularly posts new courses that are of pretty good quality. I did the AI for medicine courses recently.
I've been working on cs50-web, an offshoot of cs50; Harvard's introduction to computer science. The community is pretty big, as it contains all the people taking cs50 and it's offshoots. I find the course to be very well put together and find the lectures more broad and interesting than the ones at my uni.
No
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 MOOC in the exact same vein, but given that the knowledge you gain from a MOOC is the valuable part (as opposed to any completion certificate or check mark), it's still extremely valuable and a great opportunity to learn.
https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.824/