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Comment by cypherpnks | Hacker News Reader

Personally, I'm rooting for the open software/open content model of edX, or the very high quality pedagogy of Khan Academy and Udacity.

The Coursera courses I've taken were, by and large, fairly mediocre, and the company is hyper-secretive and hyper-aggressive. I'm worried it might turn into the Microsoft (of the eighties) of education -- grab the market, flood it with mediocrity, and outmaneuver everyone from a business standpoint. I'm also worried that they might burn a lot of people out on on-line courses; they can be very well done (as with edX, Khan, and Udacity), but because of their landgrab model/quantity over quality, most people will probably have their first exposure through Coursera.

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The Coursera courses I've previewed have been fine. But even the flagships (e.g. Andrew Ng's machine learning course) are just traditional lectures divided into smaller pieces with an auxiliary system for dealing with homework, student-student and student-instructor interactions, etc. There's nothing wrong with that, but from my perspective it's only a marginal improvement on the long-form video lectures that have been available online for years.

I predict that the incoming slew of new Coursera courses will adhere even closer to tradition. They're driven more by universities wanting to be fashionable than by a grassroots commitment from individual instructors at those institutions.

For comparison, I've completed most of CS212 on Udacity and 6.002x on edX. The edX system is very impressive for a first pass, and Udacity has come a long way from Thrun and Norvig's first AI class, both in polish and pedagogy. Udacity's hands-on programming approach is great but obviously isn't a good fit for every kind of course. The on-the-fly quizzes are more generally applicable, but I've mostly found them to be a useless distraction.

On the contrary, the Coursera courses that I've taken have been nothing less than top notch. The teachers have been great and easy to understand, the programming assignments challenging and relevant, and the whole experience felt polished and well done. I did try one Udacity course, but quit because I felt it wasn't challenging and poorly done. I don't think it's fair to compare Khan Academy and Coursera, since they are teaching far different conent (algebra vs. undergraduate level courses)

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So I've only been tangentially involved with these online education companies, what makes Coursera classes so much worse than Udacity?

A few things:

* Udacity really tries to learn how to exploit the on-line medium well. Coursera tosses courses not that different from a capture of the normal university course on-line. Coursera instructors have minimal support in how to put together a good on-line course. This comes across in a huge number of ways (as with Khan, you're being tutored, not lectured at, with tight integration of questions/videos, etc.).

* Udacity courses have massive post-production. There's a big difference between a professional recording followed by editing, and a professor with a webcam and a tablet on which to capture PPT slides.

* Udacity courses target a narrower range of subjects, and so have appropriate technologies to teach those subjects. Coursera is one-size-fits-all. It really doesn't work well in many contexts.

The major downside of Udacity is related -- they mostly target intro CS classes. Coursera has a much broader selection of richer classes.

It's a little like the Apple approach versus the Microsoft approach. Udacity has so many amazing details like the camera fixed above the teacher's hand as s/he draws.

Coursera's algorithm course felt like every mediocre YouTube video. It has little to do with Salman Khan's idea of an online university. They seem to employ a quantitative approach compared to Udacity. You also hear a lot of announcements from Udacity about courses that didn't make the cut, because it fell below their own high standards.

At one point, Coursera will have to remove some of their courses from their website, because they are so poor, and it's going to be a mess. I like that Udacity are already very careful about what they put up. That way, they don't waste people's precious time either.

What Coursera courses have you taken?

I've taken the game theory course, and the second run of machine learning, and both were fine.

I've also taken Udacity's courses on programming a robotic car and on cryptography, and am currently doing the second run of Caltech's machine learning course, so when I say the Coursera courses were fine, I do have some other offerings to compare to.

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