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Ask HN: Did you take any fresh MOOCs as of 2020?
There are what I would call "good oldie" MOOCs that people frequently recommend, like algorithms on coursera. Most of them are from 2012-2013.
Now will be some rant and justification for the question, the question itself is in the last paragraph.
At the time (2012-2013) I was very hyped and enthusiastic, imagining new courses of the same quality and kind will be appearing at the same rate in future. By kind I mean university level subjects, fundamental topics that have high return of investment.
But it seems to me it went quite differently. I don't really see any new courses being published and recommended on the lists among good oldies. My own experience with stuff that came later also wasn't as pleasant, I started dropping courses much more often.
The platforms themselves changed significantly:
1. Switch from fundamental to hands-on subjects like technologies and frameworks.
2. Switching to paid model (not that I have anything against it, although being poor in a poor country I avoid paying as much as I can and haven't paid for a single certificate). This leads to less people checking out the course and giving it a "media coverage".
3. Switching from strict start-end date to "take anytime you want". Because of that the social element for me has been essentially lost, the forums are half-dead.
4. Increased amount of courses. Together with (1) this makes it hard to find something by random exploration. When I open edx computer science section I have to go through pages and pages of microsoft courses about their technologies.
This made me gradually lose interest in MOOCs and switch to books and self-learning. I occasionally go back to MOOC platforms or MOOC aggregators, thinking maybe I just missed something or something interesting came out recently.
Did you take any good (valuable, mind-expanding, long-term rewarding, intellectually stimulating) courses that aren't famous and have a high chance of being overlooked?
- stevekemp 6y agoI'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: https://devopswithdocker.com/ https://devopswithdocker.com/ 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)
- runawaybottle 6y agoThanks, was actually looking for good devops courses the other day.
- bherb 6y agoAnd did you find any? I'd be interested as well.
- runawaybottle 6y agoIt’s sparse, I’ve actually been looking for AWS courses and things are thin on that front too. To add to it, it’s hard for me to even assess anything since I don’t know how to assess if it’s good. Now I know how people shopping around for a coding bootcamp feel.
- PakG1 6y agoHah, same feeling. Let us know if you find any good AWS courses! :D Will do likewise.
- hckr_news 6y agoI did this a few months ago. I enjoyed the hands on aspect of the Docker course. https://kodekloud.com/p/docker-for-the-absolute-beginner-hands-on https://kodekloud.com/p/docker-for-the-absolute-beginner-han...
- questiontype9 6y agoNo
- dochtman 6y agoDidn't take it myself and still quite hands-on, but Execute Program seems a cool way to learn new things: https://www.executeprogram.com/ 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. https://youtu.be/eQdkZRLD09M https://youtu.be/eQdkZRLD09M
- sbdmmg 6y agoJust 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. [1] https://www.coursera.org/learn/model-thinking https://www.coursera.org/learn/model-thinking
- frankie_t 6y agoI've seen this one in 'the old days', but never actually took it, just skimmed through the introduction. It was hard for me to grasp what I would take from it, even though it seemed interesting. Can you please summarize what you took from the course? How would you use outside of the course the information you've learned? I would imagine something like "I've learned a model A that can be applied at real life situations such as a, b to get better insight", or maybe even "I can write a simulation to predict how some system will evolve in the future"?
- ghaff 6y agoThat was one of the few MOOCs I completed back in the day. I don't really remember everything in the course--but not everything needs to be practical. One interesting thing I specifically do remember is Schelling's model which basically demonstrated that fairly subtle preferences can lead to very different outcomes.
- toumhi 6y agoI'm currently taking it and loving it. What I took from it so far is a toolbox for better thinking. Examples: - why you only have to convince small % of people for your idea to be adopted by most people (schelling models) - how self-organization in cities and other domains works (lyapunov functions) - multiple models for decision making (decision trees, spatial choice models) - how economic growth works and how innovation is the only way to avoid economic stagnation (whether it's a good thing is another story) - how linear models are super useful to understand complex situations - how diseases spread and why R0 is so important (quite timely with covid!) - how to try different perspectives and heuristics to solve problems - how culture evolves and how innovation works to change the culture - how networks work - and more things!
- z0k 6y agoMIT 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 https://www.edx.org/course/moral-problems-and-the-good-life
- _tk_ 6y agoMeta: 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?'.
- excitednumber 6y agoMay I suggest "who is learning?"
- mennis16 6y agoI like this idea! I'm not sure how it would actually play out, but one of the things I feel is missing about OCW is just having someone else to chat with that is going through the materials at ~the same time. The standard MOOCs have forums but the student discussions there are also usually not great/not really what I am looking to recreate with my "side learning".
- frankie_t 6y agoWell, essentially what I was asking is "is there any good new stuff or is this movement dead", meaning the 2012ish hype of open university knowledge, so I don't think it's a question of a recurring nature. Most of the replies here are more suitable to "what are good moocs", which is fine and what I more or less expected anyway. As to regularly resubmitted post, this kind of touches the issues I asked. If there aren't many (or none) good new materials then there is no much point reposting same things again and again, similar threads from 2016 or 2018 will do. Some communities post a compilation of what new courses are gonna start soon. I don't find these useful, because they end up being just a huge dump of everything. I guess what I would find interesting is a recurring post about learning that goes like like "what are you learning/learnt recently/this year/this season" and why a mentioned source of learning was good. This naturally will focus on quality rather than quantity.
- znpy 6y ago> is there any good new stuff or is this movement dead There might be some good content, but the movement is definitely dead. Sebastian Thrun / udacity never actually delivered. You still need to get a bachelor's degree by a regular university to get into oms-cs. Sad.
- i_don_t_know 6y agoDiscrete Optimization by Pascal van Hentenryck on Coursera. Fun class with great professor. Highly recommended if you’re interested in the subject.
- inasio 6y agoI love this course. It has better production than other courses that I've taken and Pascal is super passionate and fun (dresses like Indiana Jones to make a point about knapsacks); much more engaging than Norvig. The course is hard though, he's not kidding about needing 20 or so hours per week.
- owl57 6y agoThe course is hard though NP-hard, at a rate of one problem per week.
- darepublic 6y agoTook the fast.ai course
- PNWChris 6y ago+1 from me. I really liked Fast.ai part 1 and can't speak highly enough of it! I plan to do part 2 in the near future once I have a bit more time on my hands. The course is project oriented and quite concrete (focusing on practical/directly usable knowledge, before diving into impl details and math) so I liked it a lot more than anything I had tried before (courses on Coursera, studying on Kahn Academy). Not only did I actually learn, the course gave me the skills and motivation needed to build my own toy project[0]! @OP: Give Fast.ai's course (part 1)[1] a try. You'll train your own image classifier by the end of lesson 2. At that point you'll know if you like or dislike the course's style. [0]: https://ml-hot-or-cold.projects.chrisjeakle.com/ https://ml-hot-or-cold.projects.chrisjeakle.com/ [1]: https://course.fast.ai/ https://course.fast.ai/
- otras 6y agoMIT'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/ https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.824/
- hackart 6y agoI agree. One of the best courses i had taken on Coursera was the Algorithms series by Robert Sedgewick. Apart from going through the lectures, i had obtained a great satisfaction from solving the assignments. But this year, i have taken up the lab assignments for the following: https://cs144.github.io/ https://cs144.github.io/ https://tc.gts3.org/cs3210/2020/spring/info.html https://tc.gts3.org/cs3210/2020/spring/info.html Both have been recommended earlier on HN. Next on my list is 6.824
- aklemm 6y agoAny idea where to get the lecture videos for CS144?
- hackart 6y agoWhen i had started they were available on Lagunita. Looks like the same videos are available on Youtube.
- javajosh 6y agoI started that course, by my God his presentation is so...sleep-inducing for me. Contrast this with Peter Norvig, who is engaging and scintillates with passion about the subject. By contrast, Sedgewick has this smirk on the whole time, and talks in a monotone. His content is first rate, of course, but sheesh, he's got to work on that pedagogy!
- nikisweeting 6y agoDoes anyone know any good introductory/intermediate neuroscience MOOCs? My favorite one by Henry Lester got deleted off Coursera unfortunately.
- ghaff 6y agoYou might look through MIT Course 9 materials on OCW. https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/brain-and-cognitive-sciences/ https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/brain-and-cognitive-sciences/ MIT's Intro courses in this department have long been excellent and very neuroscience oriented.(The caveat is most of what's on OCW here is fairly old.) There's also at least one course on edX https://www.edx.org/course/minds-and-machines https://www.edx.org/course/minds-and-machines although I don't know anything about it.
- lxtx 6y agoNot sure if it's a new one, but I'm liking https://www.coursera.org/learn/financial-markets-global https://www.coursera.org/learn/financial-markets-global thus far.
- Avalaxy 6y agoDeeplearning.ai regularly posts new courses that are of pretty good quality. I did the AI for medicine courses recently.
- madsohm 6y agoI am currently doing CS193p [0] (Developing Apps for iOS) from Stanford. [0] https://cs193p.sites.stanford.edu/ https://cs193p.sites.stanford.edu/
- read_if_gay_ 6y agoStanford 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...)
- FabHK 6y agoI'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; and now you've implemented an Extended Kalman filter in C++. Right. 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).
- bhntr3 6y agoI 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.
- bhntr3 6y agoIn terms of mind-expanding or intellectually stimulating, I find it's easier to get that from Youtube. I recommend: 3blue1brown for math (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYO_jab_esuFRV4b17AJtAw https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYO_jab_esuFRV4b17AJtAw) Everyday Astronaut if you are casually interested in rockets (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC6uKrU_WqJ1R2HMTY3LIx5Q https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC6uKrU_WqJ1R2HMTY3LIx5Q) Bret Victor (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUv66718DII&list=PLS4RYH2XfpAmswi1WDU6lwwggruEZrlPH https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUv66718DII&list=PLS4RYH2Xfp...) or Rich Hickey (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f84n5oFoZBc&list=PLXsqD83He-e5oUh_DFrHbO3MoNj3tG8Vh https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f84n5oFoZBc&list=PLXsqD83He-...) for programming and design. Doing a full college course is such a time investment and it usually takes a few weeks to start proving the interesting stuff. I find it more fun to look to shorter content for inspiration. I might realize I don't understand the fundamentals of the topic and then seek out a way to study it.
- frankie_t 6y agoMIT OCW is great, I'm very grateful to them for doing this. Still, it's closer to books for me than to MOOCs by overall experience. I have never used much websites for the on-campus courses, they are rarely self-contained and require more organization and research to use. There is one good feature of those: they often have excellent assignments that you often won't find in textbooks, so I think can be a good complement to a textbook. One thing that bothers me though is that these can go down at arbitrary time and you can't be sure it works properly. E.g. a website for 2013 course may have some of the links broken and you will only find out when you get there. Still, better than nothing and I appreciate greatly such initiatives. >How has the social aspect + taking the course with others helped you in the past First of all there was just a general excitement "A course just opened and there are like 40 thousand of us". If you spend time around people that would do things like that than I guess the effect won't be as striking. But 40k was like a half of the population of the town I lived in. It felt like a part of something huge. In general, thinking that many people go through the exercises right now and struggle just as I am was somehow motivating and uplifting. Reading that something had the same issues as you 5 years ago vs right now somehow make quite a bit of difference for me. Then there is interaction. Getting your questions discussed and helping others on the forum is totally different for me than just browsing through a dead forum section for a possible answer to my problem. I had a technique: when I completed something I would go to forums and read questions, and then try to answer them at least in my head. Doing so with a "real" questions that are waiting for an answer is more engaging because in addition to practice you also help someone. And the most insane thing that only happened once: competition. I was doing Sedgewick's algorithms and the automated grader itself was brutal. I loved the course so much that I took it twice, the second time doing all assignments to 100/100. But in addition to the grader there was forum section where people would show their stats (how fast their solution worked). I remember cutting my time only to discover next day that someone did better, and then half excited half suspecting that the person simply trolling with fake numbers would go and try to optimize my solution even further. I would wake up at 5am to work on it before work, the whole place is messy with drawings on paper, etc. I cannot imagine doing the same thing when reading a book.
- niclo 6y agoI 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/ 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.
- jp0d 6y agoI'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.
- maerF0x0 6y agoIdeally 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.
- Kinrany 6y agoThe discoveries from new fields will probably always have a ripple effect and indirectly improve our understanding of other fields. Same as software libraries: we do invent new ways of doing the same thing from time to time. Still, switching to using one of the few top courses by default would be a huge improvement.
- xwdv 6y agoNot a good idea. One course to rule them all in a field creates a risk of massive amounts of people learning bad information and reinforcing it through sheer majority. Better for people to learn the same information in different ways and from different sources.
- maerF0x0 6y agoI guess I agree in the most extreme (singular case) which i assume would never happen. But I do think that there is an efficient set that is much smaller than 1000s of teachers 2x per year x 40 yrs. Maybe modify my comment ^^ to "dozens" or something like that, and that would naturally be multiplied by languages/countries as I see it unlikely there'd be massive reuse across those boundaries.
- untoreh 6y agoit would be more like different courses are best at teaching the same thing in a particular way that works best with a subset of people, so the top would be made of the set of courses that works with the majority of the population. The problem is that the way humans learn is not exactly understood, is it even a finite set? And what is its diatribution? Can it change through time/culture? Can it be identified in genetic traits? So if the learning methodology changes through time the best courses would also follow with it
- dominotw 6y agoI 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 https://www.coursera.org/learn/mountains-101
- aynyc 6y agoPSIA/CSIA? Or you mean AMGA/IFMGA?
- intellectronica 6y agoI took https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/the-mind-is-flat 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.
- moneywoes 6y agoAny good courses on python and building rest APIs with Django? Out anything really, looking to up my Python skills
- mkolodny 6y agoNot a MOOC, but I'd recommend: https://www.django-rest-framework.org/tutorial/quickstart/ https://www.django-rest-framework.org/tutorial/quickstart/
- sharmi 6y agoIf you are looking for building api using Python, you should also give fast api a try. The creator of fast api hangs out on HN. You can find his posts if you search HN for 'fast api'
- IMAYousaf 6y agoI 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.
- randomusrname 6y agoI 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.
- kharak 6y agoSide 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.
- x87678r 6y agoYes! Signed up to 6 courses. Never started any of them. I'm going back to learning by doing and a few paper books.
- 8589934591 6y agoI 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/README.md 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/ https://bigdata.uni-saarland.de/datenbankenlernen/ and https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCDIJAkbAr53I4fggNsbzdrA/playlists https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCDIJAkbAr53I4fggNsbzdrA/pla...
- fauxrockpet 6y agoI'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.
- yogeshp 6y agoIf you want University level courses, then here are few links: CS Video courses: https://github.com/Developer-Y/cs-video-courses https://github.com/Developer-Y/cs-video-courses Math/Science video courses: https://github.com/Developer-Y/math-science-video-lectures https://github.com/Developer-Y/math-science-video-lectures Some of Electrical/Mechanical engineering courses: https://github.com/Developer-Y/engineering-video-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 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/ https://swayam.gov.in/
- random_moonwalk 6y agoI'm currently taking one called Moral Foundations of Politics (https://www.coursera.org/learn/moral-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).