Comment by d3w4s9 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by d3w4s9 | Hacker News Reader

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I have been "taking" the MIT 6.824 (6.5840) distributed systems course, and the course is insanely good. (it is not in this article because this is a very advanced CS course.) You can get all the lectures including guest lectures on Youtube, you get labs with TEST SUITES, you get all the Q&As, you get exam questions AND answers. All for FREE. Perhaps the only thing missing from what an enrolled student would get is TA answering questions and discussing with other students or working on projects (and of course MIT credits), which is not too important for me. As someone without a CS background, the course is extremely helpful in getting into dist system.

All the material except video is hosted on their website. No registration or anything. You run the test suites locally to verify that you correctly completed the assignments. It makes you wonder what happened to Coursera, Udacity and many other MOOC projects that were very optimistic and enthusiastic but got worse and disappointing in recent years. This is how it should be done.

Well, MIT--or probably more precisely individual MIT faculty members and other staff--can do more or less what they want to within reason without woryying about making money..

The MOOC bubble on the other hand (including edX to a certain degree) was both a novelty and depended on rethinking educational economics to a fair degree, which included credentials actually meaning something and that never really happened. The people taking MOOCs mostly weren't those not well-served by traditional higher ed; it was people who already had a Masters degree or two.

I want to know if you want to meet up occasionally to discuss/work on the course and the labs? (i.e., be the "other students" you mention.)

I was thinking about starting the the Spring 2024 6.5840 course just this past week. I ran across the course on YouTube while studying Raft and Zoo Keeper. I saw their labs and they have you build RAFT and a KV store on top of RAFT. I'd love to get the experience of building these. I have never written golang, but I am sure I could ramp up on it quickly.

How far along are you?

All of those platforms were VC funded, and when the VCs demanded their 10x returns they in turn started to squeeze their users and the whole thing collapsed.

I haven't used them lately. Just how bad is the "collapse"? Are there no good courses left? Or something else?

They were in it for the money. MiT and it's staff has mostly traditionally seemed like they valued education.

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