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It's funny how often people complain "too easy" but I've never heard someone complain "didn't learn enough", in regards to the coursera courses. I think it's a

It's funny how often people complain "too easy" but I've never heard someone complain "didn't learn enough", in regards to the coursera courses. I think it's an indicator of how deeply broken our education system is that when assessing the value of a class people worry about how smart it made them feel (this is after all what it really means to pass a 'difficult' class), rather than how much they learned and could do with the materials after the class. Sebastian Thrun even made a comment somewhere that he realized for years he'd be making his standford classes hard, not for the sake of learning but for living up to the reputation of being hard. A class that feels 'easy' but which has a high amount of 'new stuff learned' should be the pinnacle of what a class can achieve. Difficulty should be a negative property of learning, sometimes necessary, but never desirable in and of itself.

waterlesscloud 14y ago
Difficulty can be a good indicator that you're at the edges of your current understanding. The MIT electronics class often poses questions during the lectures or in the homework that are based on what you've already covered but involve concepts which are still upcoming. This is difficult, but it's vastly superior as a learning technique as you have to work your way through it for yourself.
- Cyranix 14y ago
  Assignments that require you to extend beyond the covered material can indeed be extremely effective, though I'd qualify that with "for the right person." The COMP 201 course at Rice University (intro comp sci for non-majors) was the experience that started me on a career path in software/web development. Several of my classmates dropped the course because the instructor used such challenging problems on chapter exams. Even though I hit/exceeded the exam time limit almost every time, I found the exams to be incredibly rewarding. I vividly recall grinding my teeth over an exam prompt asking us to write a set of controls for an RC car that could be driven with a TV remote control and also needed to elegantly remember macros of control sequences... only to show up the next day in the professor's office and be handed a remote control, driving the actual RC car with the solution from my exam. It's hard to beat engagement like that. However, I still appreciate Coursera for what it is. I'm taking the machine learning course right now, and I feel that I'm gaining a fair amount of knowledge relative to the amount of time I can put in. If I were to dedicate more time to my post-academic education, I'm sure I'd want something that moved at a faster pace or set more difficult challenges before me. It just doesn't seem useful to judge Coursera negatively because it doesn't meet an expectation it wasn't designed to meet.
warmfuzzykitten 14y ago
Online course reviews written by current university students should be taken with a grain of salt. "Easy" has a special meaning to bright university students; it means "too many people would pass." I once had a professor introduce me to a colleague as "He was the A." He seemed to think the remark praised him as much as me. Only in primary schools do you hear a few voices saying "90% of the class should be performing at A level". I note that this reviewer didn't get full marks (perfect score) in the class. It's interesting to contrast the review, also on HN, from one who did. http://henrikwarne.com/2012/05/08/coursera-algorithms-course/ http://henrikwarne.com/2012/05/08/coursera-algorithms-course... I read another review by a current Stanford student who complained that the pre-Coursera Machine Learning class was too easy. I wonder how he did? A close friend of mine took that course and earned a perfect score. He didn't complain it was too easy; he went back to his company and started a group to apply ML to their business. Easy/hard is beside the point. The point is: students learn.

waterlesscloud 14y ago

Difficulty can be a good indicator that you're at the edges of your current understanding. The MIT electronics class often poses questions during the lectures or in the homework that are based on what you've already covered but involve concepts which are still upcoming. This is difficult, but it's vastly superior as a learning technique as you have to work your way through it for yourself.

Cyranix 14y ago
Assignments that require you to extend beyond the covered material can indeed be extremely effective, though I'd qualify that with "for the right person." The COMP 201 course at Rice University (intro comp sci for non-majors) was the experience that started me on a career path in software/web development. Several of my classmates dropped the course because the instructor used such challenging problems on chapter exams. Even though I hit/exceeded the exam time limit almost every time, I found the exams to be incredibly rewarding. I vividly recall grinding my teeth over an exam prompt asking us to write a set of controls for an RC car that could be driven with a TV remote control and also needed to elegantly remember macros of control sequences... only to show up the next day in the professor's office and be handed a remote control, driving the actual RC car with the solution from my exam. It's hard to beat engagement like that. However, I still appreciate Coursera for what it is. I'm taking the machine learning course right now, and I feel that I'm gaining a fair amount of knowledge relative to the amount of time I can put in. If I were to dedicate more time to my post-academic education, I'm sure I'd want something that moved at a faster pace or set more difficult challenges before me. It just doesn't seem useful to judge Coursera negatively because it doesn't meet an expectation it wasn't designed to meet.

warmfuzzykitten 14y ago

Online course reviews written by current university students should be taken with a grain of salt. "Easy" has a special meaning to bright university students; it means "too many people would pass." I once had a professor introduce me to a colleague as "He was the A." He seemed to think the remark praised him as much as me. Only in primary schools do you hear a few voices saying "90% of the class should be performing at A level". I note that this reviewer didn't get full marks (perfect score) in the class. It's interesting to contrast the review, also on HN, from one who did. http://henrikwarne.com/2012/05/08/coursera-algorithms-course/ http://henrikwarne.com/2012/05/08/coursera-algorithms-course... I read another review by a current Stanford student who complained that the pre-Coursera Machine Learning class was too easy. I wonder how he did? A close friend of mine took that course and earned a perfect score. He didn't complain it was too easy; he went back to his company and started a group to apply ML to their business. Easy/hard is beside the point. The point is: students learn.