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Coursera: Dozens of Free, Massive, and Open Online Courses
Titus Andronicus writes "Professors Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng of Stanford University announced a major expansion in the catalog of free, massive, open online courses being offered by the company they founded, Coursera. The subject areas include computer science, mathematics, and business. The providers include Stanford, Princeton, the University of Michigan, and the University of Pennsylvania. Even more courses are expected to be announced by competitors such as Udacity, MITx, Minerva, and Udemy — perhaps soon. Is this the future of education?"
It might not be the future of formal education; it lacks the cachet, the QA, the brand recognition.
For studying for its own sake, perhaps.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Free is a lot cheaper than college.
I think the Khan Academy has a pretty good model. You can learn at your own pace at home and then get person to person (from teacher or fellow students) help the following day. Having the learning and exercises take place online lets teachers easily see how far each student got, how long they spent on each problem, etc. Having a really talented teacher prepare lectures online also helps alleviate the disparagement between education received by people with crappy teachers versus students who are blessed with good teachers.
Work == boring.
College lectures == interesting. (Also audiobooks and infowars radio == interesting.)
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
I've tried to learn online, and I've tried to learn in a classroom. I've also tried to teach both ways. Nothing beats a teacher who can interact with a student in person. Now, this may transform teachers into the people who answer questions students have after watching the videos, and it can certainly expand the reach of quality courses to low income and low population areas, which is a good thing (because reaching more students is always a good thing) but some elements of our education system survive because they work.
Now, in the long term, coupling this with live teachers and individualized, adaptive education content can really change the world...
- W. Blaine Dowler
http://www.bureau42.com
As I am about 50% self taught, very often I will want to learn about say "Probabilistic Graphical Models" but don't really feel like digging through all of the material out there to learn the basics before I can even think about understanding what articles and documents even say. This is one of the first free online courses sites I've seen that goes past "Hurr, Hurr, Learn what a variable is".
Paywalled, but here is the first part of the article. If the URL works for you, great, if not, try searching Google News for a long phrase from this paragraph and hope the click-through works.
--cut here--
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/18/technology/coursera-plans-to-announce-university-partners-for-online-classes.html
Online Education Venture Lures Cash Infusion and Deals With 5 Top Universities
By JOHN MARKOFF
Published: April 18, 2012
SAN FRANCISCO - An interactive online learning system created by two Stanford computer scientists plans to announce Wednesday that it has secured $16 million in venture capital and partnerships with five major universities.
--cut here--
Peter norvig is teaching us how to design computer programs in the udacity's CS212 course. Its really amazing to watch his simple and elegant codes and if we can take up his coding habits then that will really propel our programming skills. This kind of opportunity is really massive for me considering I'm studying at a university that is not even up to standards in my own country. Never even dreamt of being taught by a genious like peter.
And I can honestly say it was great. I learned a lot, and it was structured in such a way that I learned much more quickly than had I just gone out and purchased a book and tried to learn it on my own. The homework assignments were great too - more real-world than theoretical. Thinking back to college, I wish my classes then were more like the ML class. Perhaps it was because I was taking it merely for personal enrichment and wasn't at all stressed about homework, exams, grades, etc. but the class was very enjoyable. All of that, and it was free.
Obviously I can't speak for these new class offerings with Coursera, but what have you got to lose? If nothing else, it's a great way to expand your horizons.
"I turn away with fright and horror from the lamentable evil of functions which do not have derivatives."
I signed up for "Human-Computer Interaction" on 29 December. It's been indefinitely on hold since 6 March.
Can't say I'm terribly impressed with what they've done so far
Slightly disreputable, albeit gregarious
I am so lucky to be living in this era. I have so much access to information and knowledge, more than the richest person of a century ago could even imagine. I did the Stanford AI thing, and despite not having time to really devote to it (I was pursuing a Master's at the time), it was a good experience. Now that I am through with the Master's I intend to sample from the buffet.
We live in a wonderful era, tens of thousands of years of civilization and I think we are less than a century away from becoming a Type I civilization...
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
Every time we loosen up the dynamic interaction that happens between pupil / teacher or apprentice / master we loss the very thing that keeps us creative and innovative. It isn't just a one-way transaction people, it is what keeps us all learning. I believe the printing press lessened the quality of knowledge transfer, so I see this as again another form of dilution.
come on fhqwhgads
I love this trend. Free online courses make perfect sense with the internet's information distribution model, and if the coursework can be properly accredited there's no reason to have to pay absurd sums to proprietary universities. Plenty of people have paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to get an education that was supposed to ensure they'd have a well-paying job, never mind that they'd had to mortgage the rest of their working lives to pay off the student loans. Now, they find they can't get work anyway.
In addition to online courses, I think gameification would be such a great match with online learning. There are plenty of unemployed game designers and teachers; there's no reason they shouldn't pair up. Learning shouldn't be a chore; if we stop accepting the low standard that it's acceptable for it to be, we'll have a society where learning happens painlessly.
There's also no reason online learning games couldn't lead directly to great jobs or cash incentives. Remember Rock Band and Guitar Hero? I kept waiting for a version that would gradually teach you to play an actual guitar. Pitch sensors would pick up the notes, and as your skill increased your online ranking would as well. The highest-ranking players could get a recording contract.
It's not like the world is suffering a shortage of guitar players, but it's good proof-of-concept. There has to be a way to implement the various sciences and technologies into games; I spent hours playing CellCraft without realizing I was picking up basic cellular biology.
The Wolfpack Project: BitCoin + Crowdfunding = Political Accountability
I'm a 33 year old homeowner with a full-time job and a LLC to do small consulting projects under. I have a fiance, a husky/samoyed/malamute mix and about a half acre of property to maintain now that it's spring time here in New York. I also have two small entrepreneurial ideas I am trying to subcontract out to some friends as a side project. I'm really well scheduled with my time and I decided to try and do 2 courses at once - Algo I and Cryptography.
I made it two weeks.
A problem set, a homework and at least 4.5 hours worth of video without even looking at the suggested texts that were outlined in the first set of videos - and that was one course (Algos). With 1 week deadlines, there is a serious time crunch that doesn't allow for much in the way of "unexpected happenstance" like when I needed to do some electrical rewiring in my kitchen or assemble 3 pieces of outdoor furniture. I fully admit that I bit off more than I could chew signing up for two courses. I also fully admit that I probably need to sacrifice something on my list above in order to free up more time, but I'm not sure I can bury the fiance in the backyard legally. However, I fully understand now why people say it's _really_ (read - not impossible) difficult to continue schooling once "real life starts".
I wish the deadline schedule was a little more lenient although I do understand its purpose and I realize my outside commitments account for a large chunk of my problems. A little more leniency in the schedule would have really helped me "find the time".
Hagrin.com
same article without a paywall: post-gazette site
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
https://www.openlearning.net/
Online courses, substituting grades with gamification.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=elhdZyZzJTg
Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
Coursera (pronounced COR-sayr-uh), based in Mountain View, Calif., intends to announce that it has received financial backing from two of Silicon Valley’s premier venture capital firms, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and New Enterprise Associates.
The founders said they were not ready to announce a strategy for profitability, but noted that the investment gave them time to develop new ways to generate revenue.
In other words, THERE ARE NO PLANS TO GET ANY KIND OF REVENUE. "Investments" is the only money they are getting.
It would be great as schools' internal project, or government-sponsored educational initiative. It may even work as a nonprofit charity until donors will start stuffing their own "courses" in it. But one thing that it is not, is a business.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
I'm about to graduate, finally, with a Master's in Computer Science. With that experience behind me, and the rising availability of these courses, I find it difficult to justify much of the bullshit I had to deal with over the past five years (worked full time, took classes part time, most of them lectures with homework). Many of my classes were taught by instructors who were more interested in research and getting grants than actually teaching to a student audience. Tuition went up every single year.
I did get to work on some interesting self-directed projects so perhaps that's where the value in getting an official degree lies. Maybe it's time to rethink the structure of these higher-ed programs. Perhaps a basket of free courses could constitute a prerequisite for an institutional program that's focused more on research and lab work? I don't think it makes sense for students to spend their degree time mostly on attending lectures that teachers aren't interested in teaching anyways.
It's interesting to see the different approaches these new companies are taking. Coursera current goal seems to have assembled a lot of content in a short amount of time. The content is quite varied, but so is the quality of the content, and not all of the instructors have thought about how to take advantage of the new medium. Udacity, on the other hand, seems to be more focused on tailoring their content towards online learning, but their current selection is much more limited. In any case, competition is good, and it'll be interesting to see how these evolve.
I've been doing the crypto course with professor Boneh at Stanford.
1) It's not easy. If you aren't up on number theory and discrete probability, you'll be learning it.
2) It's not 'Khan Academy'. This is college level stuff.
3) It's free.
4) It's quite a bit of work to keep up on the homework and grok all the lectures.
5) It's good. I've been doing crypto for a long time. I'm learning new things that are useful to my job.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
Anyone knows?
Self-study will always be superior because you are not locked into the misconceptions and forced "realities" being taught by the mainstream that wants to push its own ideas. Tried some stupid online programming course recently just to see how it was structured and what it taught, and immediately was disgusted by its use of Python -- a terrible language that is trying to be a replacement for BASIC as a language with horrible ideas, terrible structure, and no use for learning real, core languages such as C/C++ because the structure is completely different. Plus, the whole emphasis on the major clusterfuck that is regexp for string parsing just disgusts me -- it creates unreadable code and basically becomes a double-parsed string (parse the regexp then use what the regexp is to actually parse the string you're looking for), decreasing performance and elegance in your code.
Any type of "education" has similar issues. It's all about teaching what they want to teach, how they want to teach it, furthering any agenda or bias they have, and (especially for actual classes) emphasizing sheer memorization over learning, which creates people that are better at spouting "facts" than actual knowledge, since we can always look up and reference specific facts. Can't do that with actual applied knowledge if you are a fact-spouter.
Education in our society is really laughable these days, and we're creating a culture of self-obsessed, trivia-spouting pseudo-experts that have no real knowledge.
Great set of quality subjects on offer, but I'm wondering how they intend to sustain it in the long term; I'm guessing the current funders see it as a public-good project. It's a lot cheaper than offering class-room time, but there is still the hosting costs, the staff costs, and the time that the lecturers and grad students are putting into content and forum feedback. I hope they have a sustainable model, because it looks good so far.
Just like it took Super Mario a good while to be able to fly (being able to fall without hurting yourself, that was just lazy coding mind you), online education will need some time before they realize there need not be the same constrains on a virtual classroom than on a real one. Good news is, over at Udacity they have got two feathers deadline free. I'd expect more to follow, there and at Coursera.
In the mean time, I'll make do with mushrooms and flowers.
Udacity (the audacity!)
I walked through their initial cs101 offering. I'm a CS lecturer at one of the ivory tower UK universities, and I was curious to see their introduction to Computer Science. It's not Computer Science, or even computer science. It's more like an after school programming club - and that seems fitting because their forum is full of children. It's good that kids can pick up a bit of programming knowledge - and so I applaud them for that - but I weep at them passing this off as being CS.
I am seeing the exact same problem you are; it is the difference between Coursera and Udacity.
So I am doing the Udacity courses (very simple but so straight forward for learning) and just auditing the videos of the Coursera courses -- a few I just plain dropped because of the poor quality of the videos and/or the instructor starts talking about something else (probably present in the classroom but not displayed on the screen... very disorienting when that happens).