MITx First Course "6.002x Circuits and Electronics" is Live

Looks much spiffier than I expected. Very well organized and presented.

I did manage to get the scrolling text out of synch with the video. I think it was because I put the first video on 1.25 speed. The next video then reverted to 1.0 speed by itself, but I think the text stayed on 1.25. When I explicitly reset the video to 1.0, the text re-synched and stayed synched.

would be nice to see a syllabus on the home page

Great UI, having had to use the blackboard system for 4 years of undergrad I'm really impressed with how much cleaner/intuitive this feels.

Excellent. That is a really well done CMS, and Im not being nice. The textbook specially is a nice touch. Love the course progress.

Small request - Given that most of your users are going to be college students whose emails are cut off after graduating, I think you should allow emails to be changeable in the profile. (I used my school email hoping to change it later on. I couldve signed up for another accont but your policy prohibits that not to mention I lose my username.)

One of the first things I noticed was the video sizing. The default size seemed too small but the larger size was not view able without scrolling down past so all of the top nav controls where out of the way. Making video like a click to resize type thing would be pretty cool.

(just resizing the browser content also seems to be a suitable solution too however)

A very minor issue – I was looking through the Terms of Service and noticed that under the DMCA section, DMCA is misspelled as DCMA in both the email and mailing addresses.

So far it looks great. A full screen button for the videos would be nice, though.

Thanks for the subtitles. They would be easier to follow if overlaid directly on the video. I understand the transcript is supposed to be clickable/seekable, so maybe have traditional overlays as a full-screen option.

It'd be great if one could toggle the quality of the videos, the default is 480 but I noticed you guys offer 720.

I may have missed it - but it seems like the transcription for the videos is synced to the video so that you cant scroll and read it faster than the video plays. I'd love if it was scrollable somehow; for example, I could quickly read a section that was less than interesting, then click to rejoin the part where I want to actually listen/watch the video.

Wow, great design. The UI is done so much better than any other education site out there.

Looks great. Very clean and fast UI. A pleasure to use and easy to navigate.

It was nice to see the textbook there. It was a little hard to read though, on my 13" screen I had to frequently scroll up and down when turning pages.

I'm guessing pdf is not an option for licensing reasons, but a vertical scroll or full screen option would be nice.

It would have been nice to learn about the start of the course through an email, not through hacker news.

In general I find reminder emails helpful in keeping up with such courses (like "new session posted")

… and a big "Thank You!" for the built-in Calculator. Having a second Wolfram Alpha tab open gets old real quick.

As a "competitor", I think the biggest compliment I could pay you is this new system is the only LMS out there that even comes close to what we have built, both in content and presentation. Great job. Honestly, I'm hoping that your development cycle is long enough that we can open up a big lead while you are caught up building out new classes. Given how long the old open-courseware was around, I'm cautiously optimistic.

As a student, I do have to highly recommend not using Comic Sans for any part of the presentation. It makes the slides look incredibly amateurish.

The system is great, as is the content! The only bug I've found is that the videos revert to 1.0x playback when you go to the next one, but the transcript continues to move at the changed speed.

The only other criticism I have is the price of the course book. It's £55 in the UK (Amazon price), which is £25 more than any other course book I have ever bought. Seeing as much of the book appears to be online, it may be worth looking at cheaper options if possible (Kindle, international edition, or some discount for MITx users).

Found a small error... I was in the "Lab0: Using the tools" and I put "500uA" for the answer to "Current flowing into source (amps, with correct sign)". I got an Unknown Error javascript alert. When I removed the "A" from the answer box, all was well.

Really good overall. One thing that really annoys me in the videos however is the endless tunnel effect (slowly expanding rings). It's ok when it's in the background and covered by something, but I can actually see it applied over the TA... Pretty annoying over time, reminds me of the looney tunes screen.

The Stanford Database and Machine Learning classes had a 1.5x speed option. I found it really helped me concentrate; the extra effort needed to listen helped keep me from zoning out.

Labs, office hours, networking, research opportunities, independent study, structural constraints, etc.

I love the whole movement of making lecture recordings available online for free. Ready and open access to learning has long been an ideal of academia. But it's not likely to topple the ivory tower any time soon, there's just too much that it can't do.

There's also plenty that it can do but isn't yet, leaving many areas to target if you want to do an EDU startup. "Video lectures plus computer-administered homework" is not the endpoint.

This is why I am taking a year off before transferring into a 4 year college from community :)

Same for Sunnyvale/Mountain View area.

I was thinking of getting together at least weekly at Hacker Dojo to talk about the course. Hit me up, my email is in my profile.

I recall them saying you don't have to do anything. Just stop participating and they will know whether you are active or something like that