Comment by _coveredInBees | Hacker News Reader

Comment by _coveredInBees | Hacker News Reader

Coursera has been sliding steadily into irrelevance over the past couple of years. It started with lofty goals, and then at some point it just became a money grab when they refused to let you take quizzes and assessments without paying. That would still be fine if paying them gave you any semblance of help/support/mentorship.

My wife started the bioinformatics track and was deeply disappointed by the complete lack of any support on the forums. There isn't even a nominal course TA who helps answer questions posted by paying students. For several hundred dollars, you get the privilege of viewing a sequence of videos and going through assessments that can vary substantially in quality, without any prospect of getting any help from a community.

I've taken my share of Coursera courses in the past, but I didn't even bother with the Hinton's Neural Network class after my wife's experience and after checking it out and realizing that all the courses are pretty much zombie courses with no instructor or TA participation.

If you want quality online education, look no further than edX. There are some amazing courses on there (especially a bunch of MIT, Harvard and Caltech courses) and all of them have a pretty good amount of instructor, student and TA participation. It's so good that I've almost always paid for the certification simply to show my support to the universities in the hopes that they continue providing these classes freely to anyone with the interest and determination to learn something new.

Udacity is okay... it started with similar lofty goals and then pivoted hard to being a very for-profit organization. Nothing inherently bad about it, but I look at most of their newer content as going to a trade school where you just learn the essentials to cobble some things together without a deeper understanding of things. Udacity courses will rarely satisfy a deeper intellectual curiosity, though they will likely help you get started with coding. That being said, they do have some great content from when they first started out, including Peter Norvig's outstanding course on Design of Computer Programs.

I'm taking a statistics specialization on Coursera. While the course content has generally been pretty good, you are correct about the complete lack of support on the forums. I also naively thought that perhaps a TA would monitor them for help... instead you have to hope that someone's volunteered to be an unpaid mentor for the course, and that they also have enough experience to know the answer.

From a technological standpoint Coursera is also poor, downloading multiple megabytes of javascript to display text and videos, and to allow form submissions for quizzes. Navigation is wonky and slow. During the final peer review section of one of my courses many students ran into bugs where Coursera failed to register that a review had been completed. Luckily I got a hold of a mentor, who then had access to Coursera tech support. But the official forums seemed to be devoid of any paid employees...

Unfortunately, after these experiences I'll never pay for anything on Coursera again.

I took the specialization in Systems Biology. At that time I got very frustated but afterward I went to my local university for 4 months on a related topic, and assure you that I prefer the Coursera experience, even with the lack of support. At least what I learned at Coursera was at the state of art, and all that was taught was useful.

A relative of mine has taken a multi-part course + capstone on Coursera. They have zero teaching support besides the videos and reading material for paying customers, it's shocking.

The only difference between them and watching some free videos on e.g. iTunes U is that Coursera requires homework, has the nearly useless peer-review and one has to pay for watching.

That was also what I experienced on Coursera, but that does not describe everything about the Coursera specialization I took.

I also took on eDx "Welcome to MITx's 7.00x! Introduction to Biology - The Secret of Life". This is a great course, I liked the videos with E. Lander. But there was little difference in support with the "System Biology" specialization on Coursera. Getting quickly an obvious answer, does not help more than getting no answer at all.

The big difference for me, and in favor to MITx's 7.00x, is that the design of the exam was much more sophisticated than in "System Biology".

The forum support is simply awful. At one point the top 3 feature requests (in the pinned feature request forum) were all the ability to bookmark classes. Not a single response in any of the threads in years... nothing... it is just amazing.

I have completed several courses earlier for free and have one paid (Functional Programming in Scala) this year. The experience has met my expectations. The forums were not as active as in the early days, but the participants were discussing and some TA were posting too. Of course, it is mostly self study but I was not expecting a lot of live mentoring for 79 USD per course. I do plan to take more courses on Coursera as well.

Coursera used to be great. I've taken several courses in the past. The problem is that most courses were one-and-done deals where they were put up and there was instructor + TA participation during the first 1-2 times the course ran. Subsequently, these courses are still run in zombie mode while users are asked to pay to take them (if you want to do assignments / quizzes). I find their whole approach very unethical since they provide zero actual support for education while charging people money.

To contrast, edX will typically run courses 1 - 2x times a year and any time they are run, they typically will at the very least have TA participation although in the 15+ edX courses I've taken, there has always been active instructor participation too. Moreover, by restricting enrollment to 1-2X times a year, it encourages more participation with very active forums and discussions, even when tackling courses that are 4+ years old. Caltech's outstanding Learning from Data course had over 100 replies on many HW discussions despite being run many years after the original edX course (though the most credit has to go to Prof. Mostafa who is an outstanding professor and educator).

edX does have other courses that are "archived". Some of these you are allowed to study at your own pace but they are upfront about the fact that you're on your own and more importantly, they don't try to get you to pay them money for a certificate when going through such a course. That is the right and ethical approach imho.

There’s still Coursera courses with free quizzes and assignments. Among those I’m enrolled in right now, Corporate Finance Essentials from IESE Business School, Big Data Analysis with Scala and Spark and Principles of valuation: Time Value of Money all have free quizzes.

EdX is great - free to "audit", you pay only if you want/need a certificate. TAs seem reasonably active too.

This doesn't come as a surprise, all these money-making companies that intend to disrupt education should be closed down if they're as equally as expensive as going to a state university

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