2,400 MOOCs Starting in April | Hacker News Reader

2,400 MOOCs Starting in April

openculture.com

68 pointsrodneyrdx29 comments

It pains me to see pages like this. Someone has spent ages making this long list by hand, then it's put up as a long blog post. No way to filter by anything .... can we have it as machine workable Open Data please!

Also, think about ways to allow other people to contribute to the list so that the work of keeping it up to date is shared out and not on just a few people.

You might like this project of mine where we are collecting awesome learning resources from the Web organized by topics, formats and difficulty: https://github.com/learn-awesome/learn-awesome#readme

Actually, it wasn't generated by hand. I/Class Central generated it for OpenCulture. Here is a more comprehensive list, with filtering: https://www.classcentral.com/starting-this-month

That is a cool site! Good work.

Out of curiosity, where does the data come from and how do you make sure it's kept up to date? And is your data Open Data?

Thanks! We have scrapers running daily for all the major providers. The rest we collect manually on a schedule. We have been around for a while, so in many cases the providers or instructors reach out to us directly. Sorry, but it is not open data.

I've always wondered: what is the incentive for colleges to put courses up for free? I remember more than 10 years ago when MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) started and at that time, I thought this is probably because MIT is well funded and they can afford to put content up for free. Now we are here, 10 years later and there is an abundance of free college courses - what are the incentives for colleges to do this?

Building name recognition and attracting students, I'd say.

Marketing? Or maybe they actually take their mission seriously, to educate people, and see free courses as a way to achieve that.

Building name recognition and improving their brand. I think in the last ten years, colleges have seen that MOOCS don't reduce the demand for the traditional college experience, and have realized that creating their own MOOCS is actually an effective to create a new pipeline of potential students.

Primarily advertising and positioning themselves as merit-worthy schools in a specific field. It also gives the schools a way to sell more materials. Plus, it's a way that professors under the harsh 'publish or perish' regime can constantly publish visible content and keep their name out there. Beyond that, most people who take a free MOOC actually want the certification it leads to - and they're more likely to enroll at a school they've already become familiar with.

Nobody cares about the coursework at uni and what you learn. They're selling the accreditation (piece of paper). That's where the value is and they're not giving that away.

My bet is to reduce the competition from other MOOC offering sites. If colleges didn't offer MOOC's, then that model would stand in stark contrast to the traditional educational model. And when MOOCs showed to be effective and gained popularity, it would put the authoritative hold universities have on education into question. Now that they are leading the way in MOOC's, they can curb that authority building and reduce the dramatic contrast which makes their model seem absurdly anachronistic.

It's not just the college per say that invests time and money to put courses up for free, it's after all the professors who choose to do so, and they definitely have incentives (well deserved) for the same.

It’s usually more fruitful to look for individual incentives rather than organizational motives. The individual incentives are clear — the professor gets publicity and name recognition, the administrator gets to inflate their staff and budget, and the trustees who approve the (small) budget get to brand themselves as generous and community-minded.

Are they doing it for free though? To me it seem like they may be building for the future of learning, and getting paid at least something (certificates) to do it.

I work as an external examiner for CS students in Denmark, and I’ve seen nothing here that rivals the automated grading systems applied by Harvard and MIT on places like EDX. Harvard even build an entirely cloud based IDE to get students easy access to development environment from a browser during introduction courses.

I took a few of those courses to see what they are like, and the truth is, the MIT intro courses to computation are actually a lot better than the CS intro courses I took at Aalborg University two decades ago. Sure it’s been two decades, and I didn’t need to learn anything for the first time. The course content was roughly the same as it was back then though, it’s just explained so much better by the MIT lecturers and their automattic finger exercises.

Right now that’s not a threat to universities who aren’t doing this, because a degree is worth something and a few certificates are worth very little. But if that changes, then I see trouble on the horizon for universities that didn’t prepare for a world where they might have to compete online. On top of that, there is incentive for the individual professors, in at least one of the courses I went through, the accompanying book was authored by the professor who taught the course.

I guess there is a high probability that things won’t change of course. Too many MOOC are extremely poor quality, some sites like Udemy even consists entirely of amateurs, and it’s too easy to cheat. But if things do move toward universities teaching online, then we wouldn’t really need thousands of places to teach introduction to CS, would we?

I'm assuming you've never taken a MOOC before? Most of them are no way even close to equivalent to the real class. Most of these universities basically use these as marketing. They'll teach you the first 4 weeks of material from a 16 week course. Most of them completely lack any form of assessment tools so students can't even practice.

Well, most of the courses listed are VC$, meaning they are free, but you can pay for certification. I am guessing universities and Coursera are just placing experimental bets on this pay-for-certification model for casual learners, in the hopes that it might eventually make some money (I hope it does!).

Such a list is almost worthless without some kind of quality assessment. I skimmed through a few courses and they vary extremely in quality. Some are made by often rather young lecturers who could have prepared better so that they don't have to read their own name from a card. Others are presented by well established researchers who also are excellent teachers. Some courses cover only the basics with the result that in some fields there are a lot courses with about the same content. Other courses go surprisingly deep. A simple list doesn't help you to distinguish between good and bad courses.

You can find reviews for these courses here: https://www.classcentral.com/starting-this-month

It's the same list, but more comprehensive.

Based on my experience, apart from a handful (really a handful) of open courses by elite universities (e.g. Harvard's Stats 110), the vast majority of online courses are garbage - low quality of content, insufficient coverage of the material, inappropriate format, bad teaching. I'm talking about almost anything on Coursera/Udacity/Udemy. Even if the courses were good, you still need to spend a good amount of time with a textbook and practice the subject. And considering that most courses are useless, you're usually better off skipping them altogether and getting straight to the book + practice approach to learning.

> Even if the courses were good, you still need to spend a good amount of time with a textbook and practice the subject.

I don't understand why anyone would expect otherwise? This is as close to the university experience as it can get.

People fall into the trap of expecting otherwise, because otherwise is easier. MOOC are often used as a shortcut rather than a legitimate way to learn about a subject.

I've ended 3-4 MOOC courses and then switch to LinkedIn/Lynda & Udemy 'cause quality is much higher. Can recommend MOOC courses only when you see a well-known lecturer.

Can you recommend some of these uploaded on linkedin/lynda/udemy?

* https://www.udemy.com/react-the-complete-guide-incl-redux/

* https://www.udemy.com/coding-interview-bootcamp-algorithms-a...

* https://www.lynda.com/learning-paths/Business/become-a-small...

It's updated! My university (Politecnico di Milano) has an increasing number of MOOCs but still quite small, and all the new ones on FPGA design are on the platform.

Also, classcentral.com has an amazing list of reviews that are really useful in seeing the difficulty of MOOCs.

If I had MOOCs when I was a student... one of the best ideas of this decade.

This is awesome! My hope is that MOOCs will eventually lead to much-needed reform in higher education.

did a fair bit of MOOCs when they popped up (coursera etc) it was really really nice, I wonder what changed since ..

Reply on news.ycombinator.com