3 ms·

I watch standalone lectures, because there's no commitment to keep going. You trade a wider variety of content with less depth in one area.

yodsanklai 10y ago
My experience is that I don't remember much if I don't commit to the course (and actually, even then I don't remember as much as I'd like!). It really pays off to do the assignments and to pace of the course. In my opinion, the challenges of self-teaching are to be able to study regularly over a longer period of time, and not only read/watch things but do exercises. Those things are enforced at school, but can be difficult to reproduce in a less constrained setting. For that, the MOOC are quite useful. My only grief is that I usually don't like the videos. I'd be happier with a book.
- garysieling 10y ago
  Yeah, I think that if I were trying to learn a new skill, exercises/books are definitely better. I'm usually listening to things while cleaning, driving, etc, for entertainment rather than maximizing learning. My experience has been that if someone introduces a really novel concept or historical fact in a talk, it will sink in and stick with me for a long time. I've found a lot of fantastic material in this university's lectures- http://www.gresham.ac.uk/ http://www.gresham.ac.uk/ I'm working on a search engine to curate a wider range of these, although it's still very much a work in progress- https://www.findlectures.com/ https://www.findlectures.com/
  - NhanH 10y ago
    That's amazing. There seems to be a bug with the filter on the left side: after you select one and the page reload, subsequent attempts to filter won't work. I actually have been working on a similar kind of search engine, albeit being a more "proper" search engine + crawler combination rather than curation likes yours. It's great to see other works like yours for inspiration :-).
    - garysieling 10y ago
      Awesome, thanks for pointing that out.
  - neilsharma 10y ago
    Just bookmarked both sites! Thanks :). Always looking for more material while driving, and podcasts are too hit or miss for me these days. Would love the ability to search through these materials that are audio only.
    - garysieling 10y ago
      It actually has that - if you're not seeing the Audio/Video facet Cloudflare might have an old copy of the javascript cached, I'll investigate. I'm working on adding a feature so that every search result can be subscribed to as a podcast as well, so you can listen to everything on one topic by different people.
      - neilsharma 10y ago
        Oh yes, you are right. I missed it way up top the list of filters. I'd love that podcast subscription capability, though listening to it in HTML5 means I can speed up the playback without having to download the audio file first (my podcast app, PocketCast, doesn't let me do this). A while ago, I was thinking about doing a search engine on top of audio. The startup deepgram seemed to offer interesting tools, but didn't get a chance to play with it: https://www.deepgram.com/ https://www.deepgram.com/
        garysieling 10y ago
        Nice, thanks for this. Currently I have it searching transcripts, but I want to get machine transcriptions in as well, because it should work better how often someone says 'um', which I'm going to try as one of the ranking factors.

yodsanklai 10y ago

My experience is that I don't remember much if I don't commit to the course (and actually, even then I don't remember as much as I'd like!). It really pays off to do the assignments and to pace of the course. In my opinion, the challenges of self-teaching are to be able to study regularly over a longer period of time, and not only read/watch things but do exercises. Those things are enforced at school, but can be difficult to reproduce in a less constrained setting. For that, the MOOC are quite useful. My only grief is that I usually don't like the videos. I'd be happier with a book.

garysieling 10y ago
Yeah, I think that if I were trying to learn a new skill, exercises/books are definitely better. I'm usually listening to things while cleaning, driving, etc, for entertainment rather than maximizing learning. My experience has been that if someone introduces a really novel concept or historical fact in a talk, it will sink in and stick with me for a long time. I've found a lot of fantastic material in this university's lectures- http://www.gresham.ac.uk/ http://www.gresham.ac.uk/ I'm working on a search engine to curate a wider range of these, although it's still very much a work in progress- https://www.findlectures.com/ https://www.findlectures.com/
- NhanH 10y ago
  That's amazing. There seems to be a bug with the filter on the left side: after you select one and the page reload, subsequent attempts to filter won't work. I actually have been working on a similar kind of search engine, albeit being a more "proper" search engine + crawler combination rather than curation likes yours. It's great to see other works like yours for inspiration :-).
  - garysieling 10y ago
    Awesome, thanks for pointing that out.
- neilsharma 10y ago
  Just bookmarked both sites! Thanks :). Always looking for more material while driving, and podcasts are too hit or miss for me these days. Would love the ability to search through these materials that are audio only.
  - garysieling 10y ago
    It actually has that - if you're not seeing the Audio/Video facet Cloudflare might have an old copy of the javascript cached, I'll investigate. I'm working on adding a feature so that every search result can be subscribed to as a podcast as well, so you can listen to everything on one topic by different people.
    - neilsharma 10y ago
      Oh yes, you are right. I missed it way up top the list of filters. I'd love that podcast subscription capability, though listening to it in HTML5 means I can speed up the playback without having to download the audio file first (my podcast app, PocketCast, doesn't let me do this). A while ago, I was thinking about doing a search engine on top of audio. The startup deepgram seemed to offer interesting tools, but didn't get a chance to play with it: https://www.deepgram.com/ https://www.deepgram.com/
      - garysieling 10y ago
        Nice, thanks for this. Currently I have it searching transcripts, but I want to get machine transcriptions in as well, because it should work better how often someone says 'um', which I'm going to try as one of the ranking factors.