Coursera and Udemy are now one company(blog.coursera.org) |
Coursera and Udemy are now one company(blog.coursera.org) |
I also tried the sequel to the Scala course at one point, and the Cryptography course, but I dropped out from those after finding out they were a bit too hard - I spent way more time on the coursework than I'd intended.
But I can't say I like the direction it's taken in recent years.
"Model Thinking" was great!
And I really liked the gamification course by Kevin Werbach (The topic was still hot back then) - something I used extensively at my start up.
Reading online it seems like most people got the impression that it was establishing that all models are essentially useless. Instead it was showing that each of these models were an extremely efficient way to understand some dynamic situations, but that it’s still absurd to focus on only one model when trying to understand the world.
There was also a very interesting introduction to Programming Languages (by Dan... something? He was from the University of Washington I think) which covered multiple paradigms and had interesting things to say about the ML family.
Compare that to a 6 hr video on YouTube, next day you already forgot what the timestamp was about.
I enjoyed a course I took last summer on EdX; not a super polished experience, but the content was good and the projects were challenging.
I’ve enjoyed pluralsight in the past, but it is hit or miss whether it will have content you’re interested in.
I’m on mathacademy but that is text only and a very focused niche.
What’s the hip/trendy mooc these days? Who will eat courserudemy’s lunch?
Coursera and EdX were the peak of that for me. Udacity and Udemy were definitely more industry-focused. Some universities had their own platforms like MIT Open Courseware. Class Central was a great attempt to aggregate courses across different platforms.
I've mostly focused on job-relevant upskilling. If I wanted to learn something outside my immediate area, in a university-course-like experience, I'd probably go back to coursera.
Udemy has almost the opposite.
Hopefully, this is handled well.
Coursera had ...
> Hopefully, this is handled well.
Indeed, Coursera will be fast learning best practices from Udemy.
There is the occasional gem but you better be ready to diggy diggy hole to find them.
It isn't about competition, but rather getting market dominance early. =3
Outside of some very rare outlier cases, 0%.
The value is the potential knowledge you gained helping you to jumpstart other things. Employers don't value them at all.
But one of the professors on the admissions board was a friend of the professor who ran the Coursera course so they had a lot more trust in it.
So to add Udemy's infinite catalogue of poorly structured courses, it only adds to the decline
So on day 1 they can deliver humongous amount of garbage, imagine what they can do on next day.
They make it reaaaaally hard to find the good stuff. Many courses are time sensitive (e.g. there's no point in learning a 20 year old version of PHP), but they frequently lie about when a course was created which makes it impossible to filter out old stuff.
There are so many courses that could benefit from more interactive tests/quizzes, but it's usually limited to solving a few ridiculously simple multiple choice questions. I'm not sure if that's a platform limitation or a course creator limitation.
It seems like they must have put almost no incentives in place for the instructors. Setting up a course must take even more effort than running a full semester course in their own school, but since no one is making new versions Coursera must not be paying them like it, or offering equity in the platform. I imagine that teaching students in person is also a lot more rewarding,
I haven’t taken any recent online courses, but EdX looked like it might still be good.
I also hate all the gamification.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3119959
If you click the link to those original free courses, you get
403 Forbidden
I have access via my employer and mostly they were never that different from other places like Pluralsight.
EDIT: typo, most => that
I would love to hear insights into what has gone wrong, or what are the lessons learnt.
But at the same time I agree that they aren't doing enough to surface the high quality courses
They have forced the creators to agree on being scrapped by AI or otherwise not showing up on their own top search. Ironically this has sealed their fate, and most top creators decided to move their content somewhere else.
Though how much force is best is subject to debate.
I don't see why completing courses is a customer satisfaction criterion. I've had many courses that I didn't complete, yet I was quite satisfied with the content and could recommend it to friends.
Either way I kinda hate the 'course' format to learn stuff. I don't have the patience for it. Usually the official documentation teaches the same but in much more condensed format so I can absorb it much quicker. Because online trainings are always paced so the slowest participant can keep up and that's agonising when you have a 140+ IQ and ADHD.
I'd rather hyperfocus and learn everything in half a day. I've always done it like that and I'm a deep expert. PS not trying to brag here, these things are both a blessing and a curse.
But my work paid a lot for Coursera so they're always pushing people to use it :(
And yeah: Gamification became shallow real fast. Even the Gamification techniques in games! I think the reason is that everyone focused on adopting the easy part (checkboxes, achievements, levels) while skipping the real core (player types, intrinsic motivation)... But the course even warned about this level of shallow implementation.
(Btw: A few months later I enrolled in a course on educational psychology on coursera that was supposed to showcase some SOTA techniques... They canceled it because they could not work out the details. I think academia is often just not good at pulling things off.)