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12 new universities join Coursera
- waterlesscloud 14y agoI'm going to be in classes for the rest of my life. Literally. I love it.
- tomrod 14y agoMe too! :D
- HarrietJones 14y agoGreat. I took a Coursera course last month, and despite a couple of weirdnesses, it was a really enjoyable experience. I don't really get Udacity, but I'm definitely going to take a couple more of these courses. It also appears as though they're starting to figure out how to mark essays, etc without involving huge numbers of lecturers. It's an exciting time for eduction.
- mapleoin 14y agoI'm curious to know how are they marking essays. Can you say more about it? Links are fine, too. EDIT: Oh, nevermind, I've found it. It seems that student grade each other's essays - one student grades three other students. Look here, under Peer Evaluation: http://spark-public.s3.amazonaws.com/fantasysf/Documents/WorkExpectations.html http://spark-public.s3.amazonaws.com/fantasysf/Documents/Wor...
- waterlesscloud 14y agoI'm signed up for that particular class and I've been wondering how it was going to go. The workload looks reasonably significant, which I'm happy about. I'm a little skeptical of peer grading of essays, but it's something they've got to figure out for the future. Every class I've done so far has had a tiny minority of forum whining about grades. I'm expecting it to be notably higher in this class, but we'll see how it goes...
- plinkplonk 14y agoWho on HN is taking one or more of these courses? I signed on for Daphne Koller's Probabilistic Graphical Models and Geoff Hinton's Neural Networks courses. PGM is supposed to be really tough. I am planning to take a couple of months off from work. This new world, where you can learn for free from the experts, is a dream come true. I am thinking of blogging my progress (or lack of it, as the case maybe!)
- muellerwolfram 14y agoI signed up for 'Software Engineering for SaaS' and going to take more programming courses when i have more time... its really amazing, the courses are so much butter than at my university...
- waterlesscloud 14y ago"the courses are so much butter than at my university" That's the real challenge to all the middle-of-the-road schools out there. Now they can be directly compared to the best.
- zumda 14y agoI took the Machine Learning course by Andrew Ng some time ago. And it was a really great experience. The lessons are interesting, and I really like their concept of quizzes in the middle of the lessons. They just show the question on the video, he explains it, and they stop the video and you can choose which one is right, or type in the number. The homework is also well done and enhances the knowledge from the course. I had a lot of fun doing the lectures each and every week. You probably want to put aside a set day and time when you will do it, though, or else it is easy to do other things and "do the lectures later". If they continue like this, there is soon no reason to go to a university anymore. :) (which is a catch-22 since the lecturers are payed by universities...)
- GlenAnderson 14y agoI've been watching the lectures for the same course. Having them split into short self-contained videos (~5-15mins) has made it very easy to fit in around university and a toddler. For example, whenever I do the washing up I put my tablet on the windowsill and watch a video. I've also been watching them instead of browsing the web as a more structured break when studying. The fixed length of a video makes it much easier to be disciplined with the length of my breaks. The subject matter is different enough and presented in such a digestible way that it really is a good break.
- jray 14y agoI see that this course teaches rails https://www.coursera.org/course/saas https://www.coursera.org/course/saas There is one that teaches Django?
- mahmud 14y ago"Software as a Service" is an architecture paradigm: little of it is Rails or even web specific. In fact, any competent software developer should be able to get the gist of Rails, Django or flavor of the month framework in the proverbial weekend.
- freshfey 14y agoThis is great and I'm really excited for the new courses. I'm currently taking Vaccines and Pharmacology from coursera and Statistics from udacity. These courses help me do exactly what no university let me: Learn about interesting topics from different areas. This way I can dive into a topic more deeply if it interests me, and if not I'll just know some basic principles. Jack of all trades, master of none is absolutely fine for me.
- cpunks 14y agoInteresting list. The one surprise is that Caltech choose to go with Coursera rather than the much more open edX.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- henrik_w 14y agoI've taken two courses from Coursera. This spring I took Design and Anaysis of Algorithms part 1, and last fall I took Introduction to Databases. Both were great experiences, and I learnt a lot. However, each course was many hours of work per week for me. There are easily 10 courses I would like to take from the current offering, but for me (have a family, working full time), the biggest constraint is time. Nice though to have the choice once you decide to take one. I have written in more detail about my experience with Coursera: http://henrikwarne.com/2012/05/08/coursera-algorithms-course/ http://henrikwarne.com/2012/05/08/coursera-algorithms-course... and http://henrikwarne.com/2011/12/18/introduction-to-databases-on-line-learning-done-well/ http://henrikwarne.com/2011/12/18/introduction-to-databases-...
- hekker 14y agoThis is awesome! Signed up for Computational Investing and Dan Ariely's class on Behavioral Economics.
- _delirium 14y agoInteresting. I'm hearing a bunch of stuff from colleagues at these universities, and it sounds like it may be a bit rough starting up, especially once it gets to the 2nd semester after these initial offerings. It took most professors completely by surprise, and it sounds like there may not be bottom-up buy-in (was completely a management decision). In particular, at at least one university, profs are now being told that they may be required to teach a course via Coursera, or at least strongly requested to. And, the universities don't want to budget this as actual teaching, so it's just extra work on top of the normal class load: since Coursera courses aren't credit-hours, they don't give teaching credit. It's supposed to count under "service" or "outreach", I guess, the way serving on committees or reviewing papers or doing a CNN interview does. (This part may vary by university.) Not sure that's a good recipe for high-quality courses via this method. The advantage of the first few courses is that it was a bottom-up decision by professors who wanted to do it, and devoted significant time to do it right, rather than having it assigned to them by management.
- ramblerman 14y agoWow, if that's true that's terrible news. The idea that professors would be forced into this. If it is true however, there is still udacity, which is much more conservative in it's expansion.
- _delirium 14y agoI should note that nobody is quite sure what will happen yet, so that may not be the case. A lot of people found out this was even happening the same time HN did! And the agreements were all signed at a very high administrative level (President or Provost level, which is often a political appointment quite out of communication with the day-to-day operations of the university), so it's not clear there is an implementation plan with dean-level or department-head-level administration yet. We'll see, though. One thing universities are trying to balance is how to get professors to do more "entrepreneurial" kinds of things while staying. As professoring gets to be a little more like a freelance job (bring in your own research funding, teach online courses via a for-profit company, build up a personal "brand"), one question is what keeps the more successful professors at the university, instead of just going independent, the way Sebastian Thrun did. There's a real possibility that some of the launch professors listed in this announcement volunteered precisely because they're contemplating jumping ship to their own online-course startup, and are using this as a route to build name recognition and audience.
- moondowner 14y agoLooking forward to Odersky's course Functional Programming Principles in Scala. https://www.coursera.org/course/progfun https://www.coursera.org/course/progfun
- spacemanaki 14y agoKinda interesting that SICP is the first book on the suggested reading list. Too bad the start date is months away!
- cow 14y agoGreat,that is awesome.
- VinzO 14y agoAnyone knows if such course exists for video game development?
- vineet 14y agoThe Gamification course (https://www.coursera.org/course/gamification https://www.coursera.org/course/gamification) seems to be a great resource. It is one of those topics that there is not too much helpful material online - so I am looking forward to it.
- johnohara 14y agoThe Coursera website is iterating change faster than it can add new courses. You can feel it going from 0 - 60 with each new visit. OTOH, it's also beginning to feel -- big. Udacity seems more approachable and familiar. Oddly enough, even with 2000+ episodes, so does Khan Academy.
- fhars 14y agoAnd whoever programmed the "sort by start date" function of the new course overview page that went live yesterday or today should probably take the introduction to algorithms course :-). It looks like it sorts with a comparision function that returns a falsy value both for "no date < some date" and "some date < no date".
- pm90 14y agoIts great to see my university (Illinois) finally on this list. We already do record the more popular courses and make them available to students (internally its free, but if you're not a student you have to pay for it). However, it seems like the course that would be most useful (Computer Vision by Derek Hoeim http://www.cs.illinois.edu/~dhoiem/ http://www.cs.illinois.edu/~dhoiem/) is not yet on the list. I wonder whether the university will make that one available because when I took it there were a lot of external students (usually sponsored by their companies) and I'm sure the Uni made a lot of money from it
- tikhonj 14y agoThere's a computer vision class offered already: https://www.coursera.org/course/vision https://www.coursera.org/course/vision.
- pm90 14y agoI can't believe Jitendra Malik himself is teaching this! He is an extraordinary researcher in computer vision, and I would definitely like to attend this. Thanks!
- UK-AlasGou 14y agoOne thing UDACITY does better is that it is much more structured. They have courses that build on each other. Coursera seems like bunch of interesting courses put together, rather than structured degree thing. I think this is because universities see coursera as way increase its reputation with the public rather an alternative to university lectures.
- TimPC 14y agoThe exciting part of this for me is seeing that some of the intro courses are taught by top senior lecturers rather than just professors. I've always found some of the best learning experiences for material that isn't heavily connected to research comes from people who's careers are in teaching rather than research. One of my knocks on Udacity was the whole PhD required approach to teaching intro CS, many of the best lecturers in first year CS don't have PhD's.
- klipt 14y agoI'm curious - why isn't UC Berkeley mentioned, but this course, taught by a Berkeley professor is listed on the right? https://www.coursera.org/course/qcomp https://www.coursera.org/course/qcomp