Ask HN: Which MOOCs are often overlooked?

I think it's been taken down, but the Startup Engineering MOOC on Coursera taught by Balaji Srinivasan (of Stanford + a16z) was extremely valuable to go through, both from a technical and non-technical standpoint. It was kinda like the "How To Start A Startup" course going on right now except slightly more preparatory for the technical challenges involved.

Citizen Maths: https://www.citizenmaths.com/

> Citizen Maths is for people who want to improve their grasp of maths, and become more confident in using maths at work and in life. Maths may have passed you by at school. Or you may be rusty. Maybe you’ve passed maths exams but find it hard to apply what you know to the types of problem you need to solve now. Problems like using spreadsheets, judging amounts or assessing odds.

> If so, then Citizen Maths may be for you.

> The course is at 'Level 2' — the level that a 16-year-old school leaver is expected to achieve in maths.

It's from the UK.

For entrepreneurship, I would recommend: (a) Technology Entrepreneurship, and (b) Venture Deals with Brad Feld -- both are team and project-based experiential courses offered via novoed.

Technology Entrepreneurship is focused on the lean startup. The next session is expected around June.

Venture Deals is sponsored by Kauffman Fellows Academy and TechStars and is all about funding. A new offering just started and you can still join at https://app.novoed.com/kfa-venture-deals-spring17/

Apparently, MOOC is a "massive open online course."

fast.ai

For me, MOOC were initially a bet that the way we work, would shift from the classical way where you are employed for years at the same place, to a gig economy. The reasoning goes like that: If you spend only a short time with employers, then you do no need to waste long time in universities. On contrary you could take a quick course on the needed subject and would prove your fitness to a job by other means (Github/Hackaday/...)

Unfortunately all classical long term jobs will not disappear overnight, companies are social constructs because they have customers that are human, they need people they can trust. In addition, the gig economy had frightened many so many people, that they thought that having a university degree is the best way to escape it. So much for the MOOCs.

I think that as usual (and as Paul Graham said in 2012) universities will be challenged by new comers, but for me it will not be MOOCs. Universities are becoming more and more commodities (as reported in another HN discussion which says that the average IQ of the increasing masses going to university, is diminishing simply as the result of the IQ distribution law). Employers will trust them less and less to select the best individuals.

This is not new, I remember during the mid 90', there was a recruiting crisis, there was not enough people mastering the C language, the answer was not to make everybody to learn it, it was to invent new languages (Java/PHP/Python) that were much less demanding and also new tooling (IDE) making it possible for less gifted but more numerous people to enter this industry.

So the next thing will not be MOOCs or more people to universities, but tooling like DARPA's AIDA [0] applied to science. On a lesser scale, tooling like Galaxy[1] in biology, are excellent steps in the right direction.

There are many benefits for the society at large to create tools to plan, assist, track and audit the intellectual processes, the science replication crisis is a good example.

[0] https://padiracinnovation.org/2017/04/07/362/

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galaxy_(computational_biology)