Hacker News Reader

Comment by sravfeyn | Hacker News Reader

It's great MIT and Harvard are combining forces. It completely makes sense. Offering similar courses individually to the same Internet Audience is waste of resources.

By the way, all of these courses from Udacity, Coursera, MITx lack one unique thing. These videos can't reproduce the passion of the teacher in a live class-room. In that respect they are little boring. While they are excellent resources, kind of manuals to learn stuff, to actually 'improve the experience' they need to pump passion into video lectures. More than these video lectures I like the actual recorded class room lectures that are kept online for public. Like cs50.net and Tom Mitchel's Machine Learning.

Does anyone else feel this 'passion deficiency' in these courses, like me?

View on HN

I took Sebastian Thrun's AI class last fall, and I'd say he was absolutely bubbling with 'passion'.

Well I had taken db-class as a supplement to actual course at my College. It was just the professor speaking into the camera. While the courses like CS50, were so exciting.

I guess it's a personal problem then!

Just to offer an anecdotal counterpoint, I thought Professor Widom was incredible.

Had you taken a distance learning class before? If you just stick a random professor in front of a camera, odds are pretty good that they're less interesting to watch and listen to than the "early adopters" that have been a part of this new wave in education thus far.

Yes, Professor Widom was incredible in terms of teaching concepts clearly. But it's very difficult for anyone to produce such an enthusiasm to a passive camera as one would in a live classroom full of students. What I am complaining is not about the quality of the knowledge they impart, but about the passion and enthusiasm that they just can't impart to a student viewing these videos.

But again, there are professors in these courses (In this particular course the Prof. teaches as if someone is listening to him http://www.udacity.com/overview/Course/cs262/CourseRev/apr20...) who put a lot of effort, to produce an awe of surprise for instance when they arrive at something imp, like in a class-room. But this is an exception and can't be applied to every professor.

So I think there should be an improvement someway in this regard.

The interesting thing is there won't be all that many "slots" for professors in this market. So in the medium-term we should start to see more and more interesting lectures as the ones who are dull are simply beat out by the ones who aren't.

That's not always going to be a good thing, but it seems inevitable.

I feel plenty of passion from Dr. Agarwal in the MITx 6.002 class. He seems like he's having fun, and it makes it fun to watch.

Actually, I've found many live classes incredibly boring and the lectures uninspiring. Passion is a function of the instructor and not the media. The really good teachers would do well in both live classrooms and online setting.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com