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I've been doing the same. It really strikes me how amazing the MIT professors are. In contrast, most of the Coursera courses have me tearing my hair out. Pet t

by RogerL 13y ago

I've been doing the same. It really strikes me how amazing the MIT professors are. In contrast, most of the Coursera courses have me tearing my hair out. Pet theories on how to structure a course, mumbling, stuttering, essentially reading power point slides - I am so glad school is a few decades behind me. But in contrast, Strang, Sussman, et. al make the topic come alive. Despite having taught the same course over and over they can put themselves into the mindset of the student. Beyond that, they find the beauty in the topic, and are able to communicate it to inexperienced freshmen.

brudgers 13y ago
Coursera tends to be less consistent, but I've had some really good classes...and one so bad that I was 'that guy' who stated everything they thought was wrong with the class. Anyway, the big difference I see is that MIT OCW films instructors in their natural habitat and all the Coursera videos are shot up close and personal and this makes some professors unusually self conscious. Others are willing to not worry about production values and let their warts and quirks come across - they will be informative but not particularly entertaining...e.g. Ullman or Sedgewick both of whose courses are really good if a student is interested in the topic.
groovy2shoes 13y ago
I mostly agree, but I want to give props to Dan Grossman's Programming Languages course on Coursera. It's the only Coursera course I was actually able to see through (out of 6 or so over the last couple years), and I learned quite a bit.
- brudgers 13y ago
  I took the second edition of Grossman's course and it was very good. Kickzales's Introduction to Program Design was also good as was Pascal Van Hentenryck's Discrete Optimization - his enthusiasm is infectious. Odersky himself is teaching Functional Programming in Scala later this month, and I'm looking forward to that.

by RogerL 13y ago

brudgers 13y ago

Coursera tends to be less consistent, but I've had some really good classes...and one so bad that I was 'that guy' who stated everything they thought was wrong with the class. Anyway, the big difference I see is that MIT OCW films instructors in their natural habitat and all the Coursera videos are shot up close and personal and this makes some professors unusually self conscious. Others are willing to not worry about production values and let their warts and quirks come across - they will be informative but not particularly entertaining...e.g. Ullman or Sedgewick both of whose courses are really good if a student is interested in the topic.

groovy2shoes 13y ago

I mostly agree, but I want to give props to Dan Grossman's Programming Languages course on Coursera. It's the only Coursera course I was actually able to see through (out of 6 or so over the last couple years), and I learned quite a bit.

brudgers 13y ago
I took the second edition of Grossman's course and it was very good. Kickzales's Introduction to Program Design was also good as was Pascal Van Hentenryck's Discrete Optimization - his enthusiasm is infectious. Odersky himself is teaching Functional Programming in Scala later this month, and I'm looking forward to that.