Personally, I'm rooting for the open software/open content model of edX, or the very high quality pedagogy of Khan Academy and Udacity.
The Coursera courses I've taken were, by and large, fairly mediocre, and the company is hyper-secretive and hyper-aggressive. I'm worried it might turn into the Microsoft (of the eighties) of education -- grab the market, flood it with mediocrity, and outmaneuver everyone from a business standpoint. I'm also worried that they might burn a lot of people out on on-line courses; they can be very well done (as with edX, Khan, and Udacity), but because of their landgrab model/quantity over quality, most people will probably have their first exposure through Coursera.
* Udacity really tries to learn how to exploit the on-line medium well. Coursera tosses courses not that different from a capture of the normal university course on-line. Coursera instructors have minimal support in how to put together a good on-line course. This comes across in a huge number of ways (as with Khan, you're being tutored, not lectured at, with tight integration of questions/videos, etc.).
* Udacity courses have massive post-production. There's a big difference between a professional recording followed by editing, and a professor with a webcam and a tablet on which to capture PPT slides.
* Udacity courses target a narrower range of subjects, and so have appropriate technologies to teach those subjects. Coursera is one-size-fits-all. It really doesn't work well in many contexts.
The major downside of Udacity is related -- they mostly target intro CS classes. Coursera has a much broader selection of richer classes.
It's a little like the Apple approach versus the Microsoft approach. Udacity has so many amazing details like the camera fixed above the teacher's hand as s/he draws.
Coursera's algorithm course felt like every mediocre YouTube video. It has little to do with Salman Khan's idea of an online university. They seem to employ a quantitative approach compared to Udacity. You also hear a lot of announcements from Udacity about courses that didn't make the cut, because it fell below their own high standards.
At one point, Coursera will have to remove some of their courses from their website, because they are so poor, and it's going to be a mess. I like that Udacity are already very careful about what they put up. That way, they don't waste people's precious time either.
I'm thinking the different models will work for some classes/ students, and not for others.
I just signed up for the "Fantasy and Science Fiction" class on Coursera. The professor seems to be intelligent and well-spoken. And the traditional lecture style works for me because I'll be listening while at work, and won't be able to have the video onscreen.
On the other hand, the intro video for the physics class on Udacity seems very engaging. The teacher is moving about, showing experiments, and will be travelling around the world, interviewing experts while teaching the class.
It makes me think about the evolution of writing from the stage to the screen. When actors were confined to a stage, dialogue was just between a few people sitting in a static scene - actions were kept to a minimum. The story was divided into distinct acts for set changes. With modern films, actors perform complex actions while speaking, we can have close-ups to show details, video and audio tracks can be separated, we can jump from a living room to Space battle and back again in a couple of seconds.
Udacity seems to have made that realisation - that they're not confined to that single medium shot of the desk. They can make material more engaging, incorporate other media, props; instantly change locations, or teach through visual demonstration rather than speech.
I'm not very technical, but I did try the AI class - it felt a little dumbed down to me so I lost interest.
It will be interesting to see what other websites and services people come up with to add value to online education. I'm thinking of things like:
* Study group sites: people meet in cafes or libraries to go through class materials together. To work on class projects, or build business ideas together. You could have people with complimentary knowledge meeting up to collaborate on projects.
* Career guidance: You could do a test to determine what your strengths and interests are, and the site would give you career and education options - then select courses for you to complete with certification.
* Education portfolio: A student may want to have a collection of their best essays and projects to demonstrate their knowledge to gain employment or an internship.
* Research projects: There could be a site which shows the premise of student's research topics. Labs or real-world universities could headhunt people with promising ideas.
Actually, what I really want out of these online universities is an archive of endangered courses. A lot of people seem to want pure technical skills at the moment. But there are so many niche courses in the arts and humanities which are difficult to maintain in real-world universities, and lot of them go extinct.
I hope one of these sites reaches out to professors who are no longer teaching, and get all of their coursework online. I want to have entire courses on, say, a small tribe in Papua New Guinea, concepts of gender and sexuality in some fallen civilisation.
And I also want to have courses from different cultures and languages subtitled with English - bush survival knowledge of indigenous Australians; or old Japanese art techniques.
On the contrary, the Coursera courses that I've taken have been nothing less than top notch. The teachers have been great and easy to understand, the programming assignments challenging and relevant, and the whole experience felt polished and well done. I did try one Udacity course, but quit because I felt it wasn't challenging and poorly done. I don't think it's fair to compare Khan Academy and Coursera, since they are teaching far different conent (algebra vs. undergraduate level courses)
The Coursera courses I've previewed have been fine. But even the flagships (e.g. Andrew Ng's machine learning course) are just traditional lectures divided into smaller pieces with an auxiliary system for dealing with homework, student-student and student-instructor interactions, etc. There's nothing wrong with that, but from my perspective it's only a marginal improvement on the long-form video lectures that have been available online for years.
I predict that the incoming slew of new Coursera courses will adhere even closer to tradition. They're driven more by universities wanting to be fashionable than by a grassroots commitment from individual instructors at those institutions.
For comparison, I've completed most of CS212 on Udacity and 6.002x on edX. The edX system is very impressive for a first pass, and Udacity has come a long way from Thrun and Norvig's first AI class, both in polish and pedagogy. Udacity's hands-on programming approach is great but obviously isn't a good fit for every kind of course. The on-the-fly quizzes are more generally applicable, but I've mostly found them to be a useless distraction.
I've taken the game theory course, and the second run of machine learning, and both were fine.
I've also taken Udacity's courses on programming a robotic car and on cryptography, and am currently doing the second run of Caltech's machine learning course, so when I say the Coursera courses were fine, I do have some other offerings to compare to.
Just signed up for Algorithms, Part I. I probably won't be able to take that at my college for several more semesters, and this is information I'd actually like to know, but something that I've struggled to learn in isolation. Very exciting :)
This really makes me wish they would leave content up rather than following the cohort model -- there are a handful of classes I'd like to take, but their current model forces users to basically adhere to the university schedule (they have 4x more courses starting in september than any other month). Udacity made the switch after a couple months of trying the cohort model -- hope Coursera considers the same.
I agree. Over the Summer I wanted to do the Python course with my son (9 years old) but it doesn't start until October, when he'll be back at school. Shame. Doing the Learn Python the Hard Way with him instead
LPTHW is excellent, although if you are interested in doing something with videos and the structure of a course, Udacity does use python, and their courses are available whenever you want. You could do CS 101 with him there (even after finishing LPTHW).
Udacity has a CS101 in Python that you can start at any time and can be mastered by a 9 yr old with parental guidance. Check it out. I am sure you will be happy with it and your son will have a good time.
Their interface is a lot better and their teachers are great, they've really created a new pedagogy around the new medium rather than adapt existing brick and mortar courses like Coursera and edX is doing. Mind you Coursera and MITx is a great way to get real college classes over the web, but Udacity is rebuilding the whole paradigm and is intensely analyzing data and tweaking to improve things.
By all means Codeacademy should continue with the scheduled courses and deadlines, there are benefits to that. Just leave the content and discussions available for those who want to self-study at their own pace and convenience. Perhaps only make the certificates available to those who take the class on schedule.
It's a shame the offerings for music are so small (limited just to "Listening to World Music"). I bet I'm not the only person who would leap at the chance to take a top notch music theory class.
I was just going to bookmark this list itself, thinking it some random post by some random google plus person, but it looks like the mother website (class-central.com) is dedicated to just providing a constantly updated list of online offerings from Udacity, Coursera, and edX. Essentially, a MOOC aggregator.
I was thinking to myself just a few weeks ago how nice something like this would be. I <3 the internets.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 51.4 ms ] threadThe Coursera courses I've taken were, by and large, fairly mediocre, and the company is hyper-secretive and hyper-aggressive. I'm worried it might turn into the Microsoft (of the eighties) of education -- grab the market, flood it with mediocrity, and outmaneuver everyone from a business standpoint. I'm also worried that they might burn a lot of people out on on-line courses; they can be very well done (as with edX, Khan, and Udacity), but because of their landgrab model/quantity over quality, most people will probably have their first exposure through Coursera.
* Udacity really tries to learn how to exploit the on-line medium well. Coursera tosses courses not that different from a capture of the normal university course on-line. Coursera instructors have minimal support in how to put together a good on-line course. This comes across in a huge number of ways (as with Khan, you're being tutored, not lectured at, with tight integration of questions/videos, etc.).
* Udacity courses have massive post-production. There's a big difference between a professional recording followed by editing, and a professor with a webcam and a tablet on which to capture PPT slides.
* Udacity courses target a narrower range of subjects, and so have appropriate technologies to teach those subjects. Coursera is one-size-fits-all. It really doesn't work well in many contexts.
The major downside of Udacity is related -- they mostly target intro CS classes. Coursera has a much broader selection of richer classes.
Coursera's algorithm course felt like every mediocre YouTube video. It has little to do with Salman Khan's idea of an online university. They seem to employ a quantitative approach compared to Udacity. You also hear a lot of announcements from Udacity about courses that didn't make the cut, because it fell below their own high standards.
At one point, Coursera will have to remove some of their courses from their website, because they are so poor, and it's going to be a mess. I like that Udacity are already very careful about what they put up. That way, they don't waste people's precious time either.
I just signed up for the "Fantasy and Science Fiction" class on Coursera. The professor seems to be intelligent and well-spoken. And the traditional lecture style works for me because I'll be listening while at work, and won't be able to have the video onscreen.
On the other hand, the intro video for the physics class on Udacity seems very engaging. The teacher is moving about, showing experiments, and will be travelling around the world, interviewing experts while teaching the class.
It makes me think about the evolution of writing from the stage to the screen. When actors were confined to a stage, dialogue was just between a few people sitting in a static scene - actions were kept to a minimum. The story was divided into distinct acts for set changes. With modern films, actors perform complex actions while speaking, we can have close-ups to show details, video and audio tracks can be separated, we can jump from a living room to Space battle and back again in a couple of seconds.
Udacity seems to have made that realisation - that they're not confined to that single medium shot of the desk. They can make material more engaging, incorporate other media, props; instantly change locations, or teach through visual demonstration rather than speech.
I'm not very technical, but I did try the AI class - it felt a little dumbed down to me so I lost interest.
It will be interesting to see what other websites and services people come up with to add value to online education. I'm thinking of things like:
* Study group sites: people meet in cafes or libraries to go through class materials together. To work on class projects, or build business ideas together. You could have people with complimentary knowledge meeting up to collaborate on projects.
* Career guidance: You could do a test to determine what your strengths and interests are, and the site would give you career and education options - then select courses for you to complete with certification.
* Education portfolio: A student may want to have a collection of their best essays and projects to demonstrate their knowledge to gain employment or an internship.
* Research projects: There could be a site which shows the premise of student's research topics. Labs or real-world universities could headhunt people with promising ideas.
Actually, what I really want out of these online universities is an archive of endangered courses. A lot of people seem to want pure technical skills at the moment. But there are so many niche courses in the arts and humanities which are difficult to maintain in real-world universities, and lot of them go extinct.
I hope one of these sites reaches out to professors who are no longer teaching, and get all of their coursework online. I want to have entire courses on, say, a small tribe in Papua New Guinea, concepts of gender and sexuality in some fallen civilisation.
And I also want to have courses from different cultures and languages subtitled with English - bush survival knowledge of indigenous Australians; or old Japanese art techniques.
Ing
I predict that the incoming slew of new Coursera courses will adhere even closer to tradition. They're driven more by universities wanting to be fashionable than by a grassroots commitment from individual instructors at those institutions.
For comparison, I've completed most of CS212 on Udacity and 6.002x on edX. The edX system is very impressive for a first pass, and Udacity has come a long way from Thrun and Norvig's first AI class, both in polish and pedagogy. Udacity's hands-on programming approach is great but obviously isn't a good fit for every kind of course. The on-the-fly quizzes are more generally applicable, but I've mostly found them to be a useless distraction.
I've taken the game theory course, and the second run of machine learning, and both were fine.
I've also taken Udacity's courses on programming a robotic car and on cryptography, and am currently doing the second run of Caltech's machine learning course, so when I say the Coursera courses were fine, I do have some other offerings to compare to.
Also, you are awesome.
Their interface is a lot better and their teachers are great, they've really created a new pedagogy around the new medium rather than adapt existing brick and mortar courses like Coursera and edX is doing. Mind you Coursera and MITx is a great way to get real college classes over the web, but Udacity is rebuilding the whole paradigm and is intensely analyzing data and tweaking to improve things.
http://www.udacity.com/overview/Course/cs101/CourseRev/apr20...
By all means Codeacademy should continue with the scheduled courses and deadlines, there are benefits to that. Just leave the content and discussions available for those who want to self-study at their own pace and convenience. Perhaps only make the certificates available to those who take the class on schedule.
I was just going to bookmark this list itself, thinking it some random post by some random google plus person, but it looks like the mother website (class-central.com) is dedicated to just providing a constantly updated list of online offerings from Udacity, Coursera, and edX. Essentially, a MOOC aggregator.
I was thinking to myself just a few weeks ago how nice something like this would be. I <3 the internets.