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I find this interesting for two reasons. I think I recall that not too long ago, the most popular course on coursera was Ng's ML course. It is ironic that peop
by cpsempek 9y ago
I find this interesting for two reasons.
I think I recall that not too long ago, the most popular course on coursera was Ng's ML course. It is ironic that people are now more interested in teaching oneself how to learn versus a machine. This change could be attributed to other reasons like change in user demographics, or, market saturation, so that naturally popular courses will change once a large majority moves from one to the next. But I want to believe there is a more interesting phenomenon occurring where reading about abstract notions of learning causes a person to question how they themselves learn, and if the same abstract concepts apply. This is more a whimsical thought, than a serious one.
The second reason this is interesting is it could be surfacing a real issue with the way we have become accustomed to ingesting data. Could it be that we are becoming aware and fearful that the long term effects of suckling the internet's spout of instant gratification is causing serious harm to our ability to "actually learn".
Neither may be the case, but it seems like there is something interesting going on here.
- sien 9y agoIt is the most popular course on Coursera because it's ~3 hours of lectures and ~3 hours of study and it seems to be advertised for everyone who logs on to Coursera. Andrew Ng's Course is 11 weeks and it's about ~5 hours a week and on top of that you'd really want to be quite able at High School Maths and have some programming background.
- cpsempek 9y agoEasiness of the course is could be a big factor in it's popularity. A simpler explanation :).
- bbcbasic 9y agoI liked siens comment for the detail though.
- tonyedgecombe 9y agoIt also has a broad appeal, someone could be studying social sciences or computer science and find it equally applicable.
- subroutine 9y agoOne reason though, that the ML course was most popular, was because Coursera was founded by Ng, and that was the first course offered. Still you make some interesting points.
- cpsempek 9y agoRight, I agree, I am not convinced of my first point. As you point out, the first users were likely mostly technical people. This is reinforced by the fact that the first courses offered were almost all CS/ML/Math related.
- myth_drannon 9y agoNg's ML course was one of the first ML MOOC courses. Right now you have hundreds if not thousands of excellent ML courses to choose from.
- cpsempek 9y agoThis is a sound analysis, I agree with you. I noted that this is a probable cause to the change in "Most Popular Course" over time in the parent comment.
- newscracker 9y agoDo you have any specific recommendations, especially ones that are more recent and/or have a high level of relevance and foundational information?
- dagw 9y agofast.ai if you want to get started quickly and don't mind much of underlying algorithms being treated as black boxes. Andrew Ng's new coursera course if you want a better understanding of the underlying theory.
- myth_drannon 9y agoI like Johns Hopkins Data Science Specialization on coursera https://www.coursera.org/specializations/jhu-data-science https://www.coursera.org/specializations/jhu-data-science