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Comment by JoeAcchino | Hacker News Reader

I really don't understand why coursera and edx classes ask me x hours per week. My amount of free time is not constant through time, so I can't enroll in edx AI class with realistic expectations and this really bugs me.

I think that all online classes should offer two paths:

1. one for people that can follow lectures and homeworks, meeting deadlines and everything. This is what edx and coursera are now offering. 2. the other for people that can't keep the course pace, allowing assignment submissions without deadlines.

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I've dropped two interesting online courses because I can't devote the time. The maddening thing is they're canned videos that have already been produced, and quizzes and tests are graded automatically, so the only thing that requires real time is interaction with official course assistants.

I was taking a Coursera course (game theory), and found my work load in university was just too great to continue it. As far as I know, if I go back all the lectures and such are available still, and I can submit assignments for instant feedback. In general, after a timed course the content stays available so you can go back to it.

I agree with the OP's point in general, but disagree with you on the game theory course. This was the first course I've ever completed on Coursera and I think it's precisely because the time requirement is very low. They don't have any projects or essays or special software like other classes. It's an hour of video (30 min at 2x) and 5-10 multiple choice questions per week. The whole thing honestly requires 90 minutes of your time.

Contrast that with Daphne Koller's PGM class, which I also started taking a while ago but stopped. You had to install Octave and learn to use it, you had really time-intensive programming assignments, you had to answer a bunch of assignment questions, and you had 10 multiple choice problem set questions every week. That class simply required too much work.

I didn't take the Game Theory course but that strikes me as quite easy by coursera standards. Perhaps you're downplaying the difficulty of the videos and multiple choice questions? An hour of video on coursera can take me 3 hours to complete if it's very complex material with many engagement checkpoints (where the video is paused and the student is required to answer a question on the material just presented)

It was pretty easy, and exactly how tansey describes. The hardest part was that listening to lectures alone was not sufficient to do the homeworks. You needed outside resources that gave better and fuller explanations of the concepts. I think it was around 1-3 hours of work a week, compared to Algorithms which could easily take up 10 hours.

I am a machine learning researcher working on game theory problems, so I suppose it's possible. I've never actually had any classes in game theory, so I took the Coursera one to have a firmer background on the subject. I actually learned a ton about things I wasn't aware of, but the mathematics were all very very basic. If you can solve a linear equation (e.g. 2 equations and 2 unknowns), you can ace this class.

Many (most?) of the videos did not even have any checkpoints. The class was only 7 weeks so there was not much of an endurance challenge either. It was also really well taught and I learned a lot without needing to pause and rewind, making 2x a breeze. They give a lot of concrete examples and walk through everything multiple times.

Sure, but it had exams as well. I'm in university studying Computer Science, and started it when I had a bit of extra time. When my work load built up on proper assessed work I needed to do, and I got deadlines that clashed with its exams, I couldn't see the point in watching the videos in a fixed time and then not doing the exam.

I'm sure it's valid to criticise my time efficiency while I've been at university, but I did try to phrase my comment without saying the game theory course required too much. It didn't, but it didn't fit with my schedule.

Right, I totally understand that. It is surprisingly difficult to find 2 hours a week, consistently every week, to sit down and work on one of these courses.

I am just saying that the game theory course is by far the most accommodating of all the Coursera courses thus far. Even the exam, it was 10 questions that honestly only covered the easier parts of the material (e.g., dominated strategies and mixed equilibrium, but nothing to do with the core or shapley values), and they gave you like 10 days to complete it.

I think the main takeaway here is that even though this class was really optimized for completion, you still found yourself too busy. This is probably because the course is on the same schedule as your university classes. If they shifted the calendar a few weeks, so that it was mostly during the summer and winter breaks, they would probably see a lot more completions.

I remember trying to 'enroll' in a courera class that had already ended and was unable to access the contents. that was infuriating to me. it's defeating some of the greatest advantages of online learning, namely that it can be self directed and self paced.

I am a udacity fan for this reason. Udacity seems to be the one most likely to experiment with how to maximally leverage being online and having nontraditional tools available.

The problem is you don't know ahead of time which classes will archive their material for later study, and which will expire and disappear. I'd be able to better prioritize if I knew that. As it is, too many interesting courses happen at the same time and I have to choose arbitrarily which course to try and follow in real time.

some classes depend on a sort of "co-learning", e.g. writing classes and some programming classes on coursera have bits were the homework you do gets peer evaluated (and you're of course expected to evaluate your peers in turn), which works on a fixed schedule basis, but doesn't in a free form thing.

But, as others said, you can usually go back to the classes on your own time, which means you just missed the "timed" bits.

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