One other website that people might find interesting is MITx's program. http://mitx.mit.edu/ So far, I've tried Coursera and Udacity. Udacity: 1. Of the classes I took, only Udacity had programming exercises. For one of my friends, who had never taken programming, the course managed to capture his interest.

Udacity's courseload is:

i: video followed by a short quiz(multiple choice, fill in the blank, etc.) or a programming exercise(Create a function that takes 2 numbers and outputs the bigger one, etc.) There are generally anywhere from 25-40 videos, each 30 seconds to 4 minutes long.

ii: A series of homework assignments. These can be either quizzes or programming tasks. You can submit them, but you don't know whether you got it correct until some deadline, when your homework is graded. THe programming exercises are quite a bit harder.

One of the ones my friend struggled with for a while was a task to build a function that checked whether a sudoku square was valid when entered in a certain format. iii: At the end of each week, there is a time where they have some kind of IRC/audio channel set up, and you can ask them questions live.

2. All the courses are the same quality. Also, they seem to truly have adapted learning into a digital environment, as opposed to certain other places, like MIT's OpenCourseware

Coursera, on the other hand, seems to be a series of lectures that they then overlaid questions on too.

Some teachers' classes are quite obviously just lectures, with some quizzes added on as an afterthought, while other teachers have incorporated them quite nicely. Coursera, my guess is, will also probably have more courses on offer than Udacity soon, since it's a collaboration between several schools.

TLDR: Try them both. I personally prefer Udacity, but there's no harm in signing up for one and then dropping it.

user:	Horace
created:	April 14, 2012
karma:	5