Comment by pakled_engineer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pakled_engineer | Hacker News Reader

pakled_engineer

I prefer the MIT OpenCourseware style, where there's no signing up, no trying to get money out of you and you can come in and just take what you want out of a course, much of it graduate level classes where knowledge is dumped for it's own sake, whereas Udacity/Edx/Coursera all seem geared to introductory courses and selling credentials. I typically just want the lecture notes, assignments, and the recommended reading now. I find video lectures too clunky to load up in the bulky UIs of MOOCs, bandwidth problems, and they eat up too much screen space for working along writing out the programs. I appreciate the condensed versions in the notes too since I don't have a lot of time to dedicate an hour to watch a lecture I could read much faster.

For example this course on Elliptic Curves http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/mathematics/18-783-elliptic-curve... I decided to take after going through djb IETF working group mailing list posts which are so detailed I wanted to understand the basic math involved. Every post he writes is so thorough it's typically almost a class in itself in modern security analysis http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/cfrg/current/msg07335.h...

Also, I originally learned "real development" (my decade of hacking around C willy nilly modifying programs doesn't really count) from Sussman's "Adventures in Advanced Symbolic Programming" where you read chapters out of SICP and then work on assignments, with mini lectures built into them in just plain text http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-comput...

I agree completely. MOOCs require too much commitment to be frank. I'm currently finishing my EE degree, so I can't really afford to "follow along" given my already full course lod every semester. In addition, I'm more interested in slightly advanced topics covered in a rigorous manner.

MIT OCW is the best solution. The self-paced courses on Coursera and Udacity are OK, but the UI as you say is too clunky, and the content is a bit shallow.

Right now I'm starting to work through Computer Systems Security on OCW [1]. They provide lectures on Youtube, so no need to fiddle around with a third-party app on mobile. They also provide all lecture notes, exams, and labs for learning purposes. The content of the course itself looks extremely interesting as well, and covers a wide array of topics related mainly to RE.

[1]: http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-comput...

You can also look up the recent course and usually get updated lecture notes too, often course calendars are available at MIT and not locked for student authentication http://css.csail.mit.edu/6.858/2015/schedule.html

Speaking of Prof. Zeldovich he's releasing this traffic analysis resistant messenging scheme with some grad students in October http://people.csail.mit.edu/nickolai/papers/vandenhooff-vuvu...

On the other hand, the commitment to a MOOC's schedule can help people stay focused on the course and see it through even if they lose interest at points.

For example: Coursera's NAND2Tetris class imposed a schedule that kept me on track, even when I 'didn't want' to work on it.

The same thing's happening again with their MOS transistor class [1]. I never had a completely firm grasp on semiconductor basics in undergrad, and now I've got the motivation to go back and read through old notes, correct misunderstandings, and so on.

[1] https://www.coursera.org/learn/mosfet

I would not lump edX in with Coursera and Udacity. As noted in Wikipedia: "EdX differs from other MOOC providers, such as Coursera and Udacity, in that it is a nonprofit organization and runs on open-source software."

At first, it seemed to me like Coursera, Udacity and EdX offered similar quality courses. But at this point, I think that, on average, the EdX ones tend to be significantly better. And that difference does seem to me to be related to the fact that EdX is not a for-profit institution trying to extract money from you. Also keep in mind that the EdX systems were largely developed at MIT, and EdX was originally intended as the improved version of OCW.

I would. Just looking at CS, for example, on OCW you can get the any course needed for a degree (or even some graduate degrees). In contrast, on edX the vast majority of the courses are either introductory, sub-introductory (e.g. Computing: Art, Magic and Science) or an intro to <random MS tech>. Even when filtering down to "advanced" the top result is a freshman level course—Data Structures.

Furthermore OCW is rigorous. It includes actual homework assignments given and final exams from previous classes of MIT students. Coursera and edX are extremely focused on videos, which IMO are not the most time-efficient or thorough way to learn. The one area in which Coursera and edX shine is their automated program graders.

On the whole, I would say that if you want to learn math, CS or any hard science and you hope to actually pass a subject GRE, apply to grad school or build a truly strong foundation, then OCW wins hands down. If you want to pick up a new programming language or tool, especially one from Microsoft, then use edX (or Coursera).

Never heard of Sussman's AASP course, is this a new one ?

It's a course on symbolic programming that builds on 6.034 (AI). The lectures aren't open but the same information is all in the suggested reading as you go through the problem sets. Build things like a compiler for a DSL, pattern matching and decision making programs, experimental parallel concurrency through message passing 'actors', most of it is exploratory programming and lot's of SICP/GNU Scheme documentation reading http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/gjs/6.945/index.html

Always inspiring topics isn't it.

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