Comment by awaythro15234 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by awaythro15234 | Hacker News Reader

Anyone know how different Coursera is from Udemy?

I recently took a course on Flutter from Udemy and was pretty disappointed. Not with the platform per se, but with the entire _idea_ of video courses on programmatic concepts. I only took it because for Flutter most of the resources are videos, and not books or articles.

I find that video courses do not invite the same level of interactivity I feel when I learn from, say, a textbook. There are also of course a horrible reference as one has to dig in to find a specific video, then find the time within that video to learn a concept, while with a book I can merely do a text search.

Videos also are frustrating in the fact that one cannot fluidly control the pace. One can pause and resume and increase from 1x to 2x and back again, sure, but with text I can merely... stop reading to code something up and then when I am ready to proceed I can... resume reading. I hate fiddling with a mouse or a keyboard to pause/resume/pause/resume/rewind, etc.

Needless to say I will not be taking a video course for anything programming related again.

There really is no comparison. Udemy is youtube tutorials that you pay for, while coursera are modified versions of actual college/graduate courses from the best universities in the world, and they're free.

Just took Intro to Mathematical Thinking from Stanford on coursera, it was fantastic.

Some Udemy courses are pretty good and are taught by practicioners, while Coursera is much closer to what you get in University.

Coursera -> Helped me to graduate

Udemy -> Helped me to get useful skills quicker and make money

Good to know. Any you would highly recommend?

React course offered by Stephen Grider and data science course offered by Jose Portilla on Udemy are good.

Generally, looking at the number of students enrolled and the rating of a course gives a good idea on quality.

I hate videos too, but they are useful. If you're taking a course that's GUI heavy it pays off. First time I decide to learn iOS programming, it was great. Figuring out the exactly 10 locations I have to click and in which order is faster with video than any other way. So it depends exactly on what you're trying to achieve. Before acloud guru had it's site, they were on udemy. It was great for getting my AWS cert back then, I just watched the videos and didn't have to wade around AWS console to find out where things are. So for tech stuff, it's really useful if what you're learning is more GUI heavy than CLI heavy.

Yeah, it depends. I've taken some LinkedIn (formerly Lynda) courses on video editing and the like and it works far better than text with photos would. But video for something that could simply be explained with some bullet points is awful.

I also used to be very excited about online courses until I experienced them as superficial when compared to books and self-checks. I think the best way to learn some things ends up being experiential, so something more like an apprenticeship than a lecture would be the most efficient. But in reality, it seems hard to find that.

You also find the same in, for example, college. Where a tutor may be able to get you up to speed faster by 'debugging' your learning.

While I agree, I find I learn best by watching then doing.

Coursera is significantly better in my experience with their deep learning specialization. Lots of good jupyter notebook work and quizzes.

Took an algorithms related course. Video lectures are there. But practice using Quiz & auto grader for evaluating programs was pretty good. IIRC there will be transcripts but check with the particular course.

Coursera - taught by some of the world's best professors on cutting edge topics.

Udemy - professionals looking to make money outside of their day job by teaching, with varying levels of competency at either their profession or the ability to teach.

You'll get more "practical" or "current" topics out of Udemy, but better education out of Coursera.

Coursera is very bad at keeping their courses live though. Udemy is much better at this.

> Coursera - taught by some of the world's best professors on cutting edge topics.

I would say the distribution is way wider. Yes, there are top courses by top universities but those are sadly a minority. There are lots upon lots of mediocre courses either by big or small universities and the worst offenders the programs created by vendors (Google, IBM, etc) which are nothing but a barely disguised way to push their platforms. Going directly to the university site and you will find the real deal, last term course which usually will be significantly better.

Nothing to disagree with here. Come to think of it I hope COVID puts more recorded lecture online from Ivy League et al, overall. The only issue is that it's easy to put them behind paywall or student logins or what have you.

One bonus with the Google/Facebook/whatever approach is that you sometimes get academics who became in-house researchers to teach their courses. This was more common in the early days and pretty much what you get out of Udacity. It's true that they train to the platform but there really isn't another way to get e.g. Sebastian Thrun out there anymore. Another view may take that as a broken window, however.

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