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University of Reddit

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105 pointsjayzalowitz47 comments

There was quite some controversy about [1] this C++ course. It supposedly was a collection of bad practices and an all round bad way to learn C++.

[1] http://ureddit.com/class/23620/introduction-to-c----a-video-...

Thank you for this comment! I otherwise would have dived straight into the C++ course as I have been thinking about learning it for a while now. That said, do you or does anyone have a reccommendation on an online tutorial/course for learning C++? I already have a few years of programming experience, mostly in Java, Python and Haskell. I hope it is not the wrong place and time to ask such a question.

MIT OCW to the rescue! http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-comput...

Also, Stanford's C++ course: http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs106l/index.html

The MIT course is a bad choice for modern C++ (this course is just C with classes). Just have a look at this lecture:

http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-comput...

The use of C-style arrays and strings is actively discouraged by most C++ gurus (Stroustrup, Sutter, Meyers).

Crap, I did not actually check the content to verify its quality. Thank you very much for pointing that out! You've reminded me to be more careful about offering advice, lest I do more harm than good. Again we are reminded to be wary of the advice/help given by others, even if under the best intentions.

I don't think you could find a good (modern and complete) online resource for learning C++. You will find bits of knowledge here and there.

Your best bet is to read C++ Primer 5th edition by Lippman or wait another month or two for the book of B. Stroustrup to be published.

Your statement directly solidifies my thoughts about the quoted line from the failed kickstarter.

"The principle of UReddit was simple: anyone can register an account and teach a class on whatever he or she likes..."

Rightfully so. UReddit was setup as a self-service with only one developer. Between myself, a few kind subreddit mods, and the dev, it was difficult to verify everything. We mostly relied on the teacher's peers to let us know if something was not up to par. If/When we launch Open Compass, verification will be implemented, and only the best content from UReddit will make it there.

/r/programming thread

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/197dn1/introduc...

Yes thank you, this was the thread I was referring to.

For anyone confused by the lack of context, it basically seems to be an aggregation of any post in /r/UniversityofReddit/ that starts with "[Class]".

(There are actual legal guidelines for using the word "University" in some states and countries; I wonder if the name will last.)

They are actually kickstarting a platform, OpenCompass that much more closely resembles Coursera/Udacity. Perhaps a minor reason for that was to help get away from the word University as they grow. Possibly Reddit too, their default homepage isn't exactly gleaning with intelligence most of the time.

Sadly, the Kickstarter seems to have ended unsuccessfully?

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1918344721/open-compass

Unfortunately Kickstarter did not work for us. This will just force our Open Compass to seek actual investors.

That's not quite how it works. The subreddit and UReddit.com sites are not connected like that.

Teachers go in and list their courses, syllabus, and relevant information to make it easier for folks to find after the content falls off our front page. There is also a messaging feature so that once a student enrolls (adds) a class, the teacher can message them with updates. So it is an aggregator or sorts, but it's also a tool to increase communication and organization. As far as using the term University, unfortunately that was picked in 2010, and we often just go by UReddit.

How do they ensure that teachers know what they're talking about? There's a lot of topics I can think of where someone can easily sound like they are an expert, but instead just have an amateur understanding of it. Any kind of topic involving some amount of subjectivity would be hard to ensure that best practices are being taught.

Having worked in higher ed for 10+ years, let me tell you, in a lot of disciplines, they don't vet as much as you might think.

Certainly, high profile/cost courses with lots of interest in teaching them are, but the big money makers such as con-ed, distance learning and apprenticeship take the most convenient person available and throw them in, often at the last minute with zero preparation.

I don't see how this differs from ureddit.

Which is one of the reason those degrees are viewed as less valuable than a similar degree from a more prestigious institution which is assumed to have higher (teaching/admission/grading) standards. That is still the biggest obstacle for non-traditional education. How do you assess the value of the degree and then communicate that value to others?

"I don't see how this differs from ureddit."

$80,000 waste of time versus a much cheaper but still waste of time?

>How do they ensure that teachers know what they're talking about?

AFAIK, they don't. There was a big fiasco recently when some guy who was teaching a C++ course was featured as "course of the week" or something, which got posted to /r/programming, and they basically tore him to shreds.

A lot of people were claiming that some of the problems were nit-picky, but there were certainly some significant issues with the code. It was the sort of stuff that someone who read C++ Primer probably wouldn't do, but someone who read "How To Program C++ in 21 Days for Dummies: the Absolute Moron's Guide" might.

The presentation was pretty terrible too, but that doesn't necessarily speak towards whether he knows what he's talking about.

EDIT: Here's the thread http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/197dn1/introduc...

That's by far the most ambitious Reddit project I've seen. Moderation would have to be quite a bit aggressive, yet hopefully sensible, but I can see this as a genuine alternative the stack* forums (which I feel are a bit stuffy and too "closed as not constructive").

StackExchange sites are meant to be for questions and answers, they aren't comparable.

Humans aren't APIs. If observing Stack and a whole heap of other sites (even apps and gadgets) have ever taught me anything, it's that your creation is what your users take it to be. Not what you originally intended.

I mean sure, the "nudge" method works by locking, deleting even outright banning, but in the end, people will do what comes naturally. It's like trying to make water flow upwards on a waterfall. The natural direction of interraction is toward discussion, not just question-in-answer-out.

> I mean sure, the "nudge" method works by locking, deleting even outright banning, but in the end, people will do what comes naturally.

Alternatively, you can just give people a place to do what comes naturally, so that it doesn't clutter their "productive effort." Talk pages on wikis, for example.

That's true. And I guess that's what "Meta" was supposed to be, but there's still a lot of the same handicaps applied there and "polling" questions (whatever that means today vs. tomorrow) get voted down to obvlivion. E.G : http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/138411/why-are-const...

So even in a place that's talk "of" the place still isn't safe to talk of.

I think the problem there, is that meta.stackoverflow is still considered by the StackOverflow guys to be an instance of type QuestionAnswerSite. Which means that it's a place to ask objective questions about StackOverflow, not really a place to "talk about things."

What they really need is forum.stackoverflow.com. Or, more likely, given the leadership, discourse.stackoverflow.com.

No, what I meant was that University of Reddit is not an alternative to StackExchange. University of Reddit is for learning new skills, kind of like Khan Academy, Coursera, Udacity, or a real University. StackExchange sites are for solving problems, I very much doubt they will ever become anything like that regardless of natural evolution. I have seen plenty of interesting discussions closed on StackExchange and whether or not that's a good thing is besides the point. The fundamental purpose of the two services is not comparable.

It's called the StackExchange Network by the way, not Stack.

Yes, by Stack* I was referring to StackExchange's sites.

There have been things like this for a fairly long while on Reddit. Mostly, they have been along the lines of organizing a study group version of self-study following, doing something like a course on OCW.

They predated Coursera, and the first three pre-Coursera/Udacity courses for ML, DB, AI got a lot of buzz in that community.

However, in general, the problem has had less to do with the need to moderate, and more with the slow decline in enthusiasm when there is insufficient follow through.

Perhaps one of the ones that has been the most successful, "carlhprogramming", benefited because it wasn't only lead by someone who wanted to learn along with the rest of the class, but filled the role of instructor. If so, that might not auger well for groups of peers learning together.

However, I haven't checked any of these out recently, and I could be completely off base about how ambitious this is and how likely it is to really help a lot of people learn new things.

Maybe those earlier efforts didn't because it was too connected to the rest of the community? A completely different place to discuss "nothing but" may be what was needed and if the earlier efforts had more direction, maybe they would have seen continued adoption. It's pretty easy to get distracted on Reddit after all so complete self-study may not have been very effective.

I hope this does take off and incorporate the best of those.

I hope archive.org or similar will find a useful/successful way of crawling this. Such resources should be given the durability of independent redundancy (where permissible).

Most of the content listed on UReddit is actually housed on the teacher's own site or subreddit. We are really just an aggregate to help them organize and reach more people. Plus they have complete control and ownership of their content. Unfortunately our non-profit Open Compass hit a delay as we were hoping KickStarter would work out for us.

Thanks for the reply. :-)

I understand that. What I meant is that I hope those resources are archived. And, as part of that, perhaps archive.org could target UReddit as a... source of targets, I guess.

I've been around long enough to have repeatedly experienced such resources disappearing. A professor changes institutions. Infrastructure is reorganized. Materials are deliberately removed, but the earlier license would allow independent copies to continue to exist and proliferate.

That's what I'm after.

You are right, and unfortunately that has already happened. I have become more diligent about helping teachers who launched their class one or more years ago to host their content in other formats, or transfer them to PDFs. In some cases I was even going to the Google cache version, transferring it to a free blog, and making it available.

One of our main needs with Open Compass was the expenses that came with running servers all the time, and hosting said content. We did not officially define how that would work yet, but ideally the content would be housed in Open Compass, but the teacher still retains all rights/control. At least that way if their domain expired this would be less of an issue. Sadly we're just a very small team, and we are the sole investors.

Pretty cool. My only gripe is the entire Computer Science section should be renamed to Programming.

There's a lot more to Computer Science than Programming. What about cryptography, machines, sensors, storage, robotics etc... ?

Edit: On closer read, I see your point. A separate topic just for programming would be more appropriate.

I think it's interesting that everything seems to be introductory level[1]. I wonder if over time higher level material would be added.

[1]: Don't get me wrong, it's still useful and imo, great.

Not in the math section. Intro to Representation Theory and Intro to Category theory seem like grad level classes.

Seems like reddit has some thoughts how to handle huge pile of information which is 'out there'. As ardent reddit lurker this was most needed feature of reddit.

What does this have to do with Reddit?

Yeah I can't figure this out.

It's historical. It was started by reddit user http://reddit.com/u/eawesome3

http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/c0vx3/dear_reddit...

http://www.reddit.com/r/UniversityofReddit/comments/c0wil/we...

Correct. Unfortunately eawesome3 is not really involved any longer. It's mostly Anastas and myself. Here is the actual link to eawsome3's original post from 2010 though http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/c0vx3/dear_reddit...

A lot of classes have their class location as a subreddit - like the mysql[1] for example.

1 - http://www.reddit.com/r/UniversityofReddit/comments/oas6u/cl...

Nothing directly,

Bottom of page: University of Reddit is not in any way affiliated with Reddit or Conde Nast.

FAQ: Are you affiliated with reddit? The short answer is "not yet". However, we are working on it.

Have you obtained a license to use the reddit name/brand along with the mascot/logo?

"For all of the above reasons, we require a license if you want to use the reddit brand in anything you do, both for free and for profit."[1]

[1] http://www.reddit.com/wiki/licensing

Finally I can get my PHD in mensrights, creepshots, and jailbait.

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