Anybody Taking Any MOOCs?

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Are they well-organized and are you learning anything?
Do you think it will help with work/career?
Do you participate in the course forums and get along with the other students?

Are these online classes like edX and coursera?
It probably depends on what classes you want to take, how good they are.
Online classes seem quite interesting, and I would like to take math and science classes, but there is no time, no time at all.
If you like discussing topics with people, then the forums would be a plus, if others post regularly.

Yes. Coursera, edX, udemy, udacity, etc.

The classes on edX seem so interesting and many areas I want to learn at least the basics in.
I may have to take some or follow along like auditing if possible.

What kinds of classes do you want to take?

I'm taking Introduction to Computer Science and Programming Using Python on edX. It starts today. All my other MOOCs are on Coursera. I've been taking courses for the Data Science Specialization, but I'm not sure I'll finish it.

Can you post how it is when it starts?
I saw some others like digital circuit design that would be fun to follow along with structured material, but I don't have time to take it.

I'm now taking 3 courses on edX: the introductory python course, a science writing course, and a data analysis course. I'm also taking Algorithms 1 on Coursera (using Java). Both platforms give pre- and post-course surveys to help improve the courses. Some courses have all the material available at once, some release it week-by-week. Both websites offer verified certificates that we can purchase during the first few weeks of the course, but only Coursera offers financial aid to pay for them. Both have video subtitles in multiple languages but edX subtitles are difficult to follow because they scroll up the left side of the webpage. Both allow you to enroll ahead of time and send out reminder e-mails when the courses start (or just before). They also send out e-mails to remind us about deadlines and when new lessons are posted or new modules begin.

The edX courses are laid out better than the Coursera courses, except for the forums. edX has one video lecture per page and you just click an arrow to get to the next one. The lectures are usually just videorecordings of the professors talking, sometimes with close-ups of slides or computer screens (for programming). The lessons are neatly arranged in the right sidebar and you can see if there are any upcoming quizzes or homework. In between every 1-3 video lectures are untimed quizzes that are very helpful for learning. We get multiple attempts on the quizzes.

Links to other stuff like syllabus, progress, and calendar are neatly laid out at the top of the page. Instead of one set of forums linked on one page, there are comment boxes at the bottom of every page that have to be expanded to read all the posts and there's no way to subscribe to the forum for e-mail reminders.

The edX programming course seems to be getting difficult very quickly. We didn't even learn to write simple programs (arithmetic and loops) until the end of Week 1, now in Week 2 we have to read 20 - 30 line programs that implement numerical algorithms in the quizzes.

Coursera has no progress page, you have to look at individual assignment/exam webpages and add up your score, all the available lectures are listed on one page (its nice to see them all at once but it looks a bit cluttered), there are fewer quizzes that are longer (more like exams) we get 3 attempts per quiz (best score gets recorded), and they're not timed. So far Coursera has work/quizzes due weekly or bi-weekly.

Some of the lectures are available on Youtube. The video lecture lengths vary a lot. So far on edX they're all about ten minutes or less, but I recently finished a horrible statistics course on Coursera that had 20-35 minute videos for almost every lecture. Students are allowed a lot of freedom to explain how to do the coursework on Coursera forums, we just can't give details like specific calculations. There are usually recommended textbooks that are optional, sometimes just downloadable pds written by the professor(s). Some courses use varying amounts of peer assessment to deal with the thousands of assignments that can't be graded automatically.

Signing up for the Verified Certificate on Coursera requires us to verify our identity every time we submit work to the site. We have to type a sentence (the site recognizes our typing patterns from a previous typing sample), then allow the site to take control of our webcam to snap a picture of us. We have to submit a picture of a photo ID once, before signing up for any verified certificates.

Thanks for the update.
Do you find that you are learning a lot?
How is online course learning compared to e.g. getting books and learning python yourself?

I'll say this, they'll most likely give you the information you need to learn the skills for a job in the industry you're applying for. Finding a job, however, is another ball game. The degrees people toss around don't tell employers jack or s**t about their actual skill level, it merely tells the employer they played the game and if it's a "good" university that tells the employer they're probably socially fit to employ. I've met a fair amount of people with college degrees from good universities that didn't know s**t about their expertise, yet they still had good jobs in that area of expertise. This tells me the university itself is no guarantee of knowledge and that employers for the most part only care about minimal standards. It's all social anymore, there's no getting around it.

I would recommend learning python though. I'm getting into hobbyist micro-controller circuitry myself and python seems to be the co-standard with regular C. I'd never used it until about a week ago and it's super simple compared to the more complex languages. I think you mentioned something about code a while back, meaning you're at least familiar with programming concepts-- if that's the case python should provide you no challenge.

Yes, but that is partially because I am an active learner. I don't just watch the videos; I try to do what the professor does on my computer, and make up similar examples for myself to try, like with different numbers.


Basically, the online courses give me motivation, structure, and guidance.

I'm most motivated to learn when I'm being challenged. When I learned programming on my own, from a textbook, I had to make up my own programs to write, which I was not motivated to do. I didn't find it easy, either. Most people probably learn programming because they want to create something specific, but I just like the logic. Even when I used the exercises from the textbook, I gave up sooner because I didn't have a deadline and a grade to motivate me. I tend to feel the urge to read textbooks from cover to cover because I'm not sure which information is important and which isn't, so learning that way can be boring and take a long time. I think that I am learning faster with online courses.

With online courses, I know that the video lectures usually give me pretty much everything I need to know to pass. I bought some cheap textbooks, but I only use them to look up small details. I like the structure of having a specific lesson each week or every two weeks, and deadlines so that I know how long it should take to learn the skills. I have a better idea of which topics are the most important. Also, some of the courses are focused on career and give the students projects that we can use in a portfolio. Using the course forums was easier and more helpful than using generic technical forums because everyone was working on the exact same thing. I don't know if the certificates will help me get a job, but they are motivating and I think it looks good to link to them.

With math I probably have barely any attention span at all to learn on my own from a book, so taking math MOOCs will be a huge difference. I don't even like learning as much as I like being tested.

The difficult part of MOOCs is my auditory processing issues. Listening for a long time is tiring, and I tend to zone out. My attention span for reading and studying on my own is longer. I tend to do ok with the courses that are split up into short videos. For the longer videos, I just watch them a little at a time, then pause them and do something else for a while. Also, I sometimes preview the lecture slides so I have an overview of the whole lecture in my mind and don't get lost in the details of a long lecture.

I had a problem with the auditory part too, when I watched a video from a coursera class.
There was too much talking and talking head professor, and visual slides seemed sloppy and couldn't make up for my lack of auditory learning.

I've done a few MOOCs, never finished any of them either due to not caring or them annoying me. The last one I dropped out of quickly because it was a hideous smoldering pot of groupthink and not much else. I was participating in a group and ended up doing most of the work and helping to organize everyone, and I wasn't even the group leader. After that I quit because I really hate groupthink.

My Algorithms course is becoming ridiculous. Just figuring out what to do for the assignment is a small research project. This is the FAQ (not even the instructions, but a clarification of the assignment)for the first programming assignment:

http://coursera.cs.princeton.edu/algs4/ ... ation.html

It's a freakin essay.

A lot of offline computer science classes also have long instructions and faqs like this, I don't know why, as computer science is one of those things that doesn't seem to need tons of words to communicate, since most of it is concepts and code. It's not like biology, where they have to tell you all the things they did in the eggsperiment. I think people are just getting wordier for some reason, it seems like modern textbooks are so much wordier than old textbooks from 1950s, maybe the authors get paid more for a bigger book.

I did take a MOOC last year called AstroTech: The Science and Technology behind Astronomical Discovery.
https://www.coursera.org/course/astrotech

It was quite the learning experience I learned allot of new things in Astronomy, with the MOOC being so new its so damn primitive in terms off presenting the learning content in a fast way for me to learn the lectures are not exciting innof, it has a long way to go before it will improve more, sure you can take certificates but it still doesn't count much if your trying to apply for a University or a job.

I really like seeing universities doing new radical changes to learning like what they have done with MOOC's then living comfortable with the same learning system that has existed since the early 20th century.

Anyone has seen this website before called http://www.thegreatcourses.com/ they present lectures in a totally different either you can watch it through video or listen to audio.

If only courses you take over the net counted for something either if its MOOC's or the thegreatcoures that would have been revolutionizing that could come in time.