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Another Player In the World of Free, Open Online CS Courseware
dncsky1530 writes "UNSW professor Richard Buckland, lecturer of the famous Computing 1 course on YouTube, is now running a large scale open online Computer Science course for the world. UNSW Computing 1 — PuzzleQuest and the Art of Programming starts off with microprocessors and works it way through C with interactive activities while taking students on an adventure of hacking, cracking and problem solving. It's based around a three month long PuzzleQuest with grand and suspiciously unspecified prizes as well as fame and glory for the intrepid. The next class starts December 3rd 2012."
My 1st-year comp lecturer on Slashdot! What a legend.
Cool, count me in
Apologies, it stands for the University of New South Wales in Australia.
Bzzztt acronyms should be defined on first use by any writer especially when they aren't common knowledge. I DID google it but would have posted the same if the AC hadn't beat me to it.
I haven't watched the lecture yet but if you think pointers and hash tables aren't worthy of 30 minutes each then I doubt you fully understand hash tables and pointers.
Understanding how these and other key memory mechanisms work is the secret to fast and efficient code. Your compiler simply won't fix this for you.
I would highly recommend R. Buckland videos for learning. I monitored his UNSW sponsored Semester 1 Computer science course "1917", from 2008. He has a Semester 2 course on youtube as well. There may be others, The first semester course has 50-some videos, each roughly an hour long. He explains even difficult things very clearly.
But if it is free as in free beer I'm in
TFA mentions this is a first MOOC online course for Australia. I find that hard to believe, does anyone know of others?
I had a biology teacher who often got lost, talking about stuff that had nothing to do with biology. The thing is, whatever he was flapping his gums about was INTERESTING. No person in the class was ever bored.
Funny thing about all that is, we all hung on his every word. He might waste ten of the forty minutes in class on nonsense, but he had our attention for the other 30 minutes as well. The motorheads and jocks passed the course, with little problem. There aren't a lot of teachers who can make a claim like that.
The funny looking guy from New South Wales seems to understand that.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
I have taken (face to face) all three of Richard Buckland's base computer science courses and he has had a profound effect on my life. His lectures were deeply moving and manage to examine not only the essence of computer science, but also the joy of problem solving and beauty in life. He is the reason I decided to persue computer science and I cannot heap enough praise on him.
My dad was a Chemistry teacher who was often accused of wasting time with silly stories. What he was actually doing was putting into practice the theories of David Ausubel, who proposed something called an "advance organiser" -- the teacher evokes a known and familiar concept analogous to the new concept to be taught, thus priming the brain to understand it implicitly in terms of the analogue and to approach tasks using the same strategies as it would employ on the analogue.
It's not the simple idea of amusing with stories as an adjunct to teaching, it's an integral part of teaching. If this guy does that, cool.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
Okay, I'm not Anonymous, and I haven't taken any Richard Buckland courses.
I have been involved with the MOOC movement since last year (Dr. Thrun's AI class), taken several online courses, and study human learning for my day job. I've evaluated and compared the teaching styles of MOOCs for my own purposes.
From what I've seen of his work online (YouTube videos), Richard Buckland is the best.
In my opinion his style of presentation maximizes the student interest. Regardless of the content, Richard Buckland will make learning enjoyable; he will cultivate the student's interest and perceived value.
Coursera and edX believe in the "learning is hard" model - they present artificial barriers and difficulties so that only the most intelligent and dedicated student will complete the course. For an example, watch the first lecture or two of Daphne Koller's "Probabalistic Graphical Models" online course.
Richard Buckland takes the view of "learning is fun", and does everything he can to motivate the students. He's been trying out different techniques over the years, keeping what works and dropping what doesn't. At this point in his career, he's got a pretty good handle on what encourages students to learn.
I predict that "The Art of Programming" will have the highest completion rate of all the online courses.
Of the course offerings and business models I've seen, this is likely to be the best one to date.
really liked it actually, thank you for flaming a good episode.
hash tables are pretty important, and he almost covered everything quite entertainingly. He definitely makes his students listen, very good teacher.
I agree, MIT and CMU do brilliant stuff too, but I am not sure, if watching the best will help you understand them, especially after reading your comment
Slashdot stories should have someone go through and check to see if there are any terms or acronyms that are not commonly known to geeks and geek-like persons who might read Slashdot. Call me ignorant, but WTF is UNSW? Is that the University of North South West? University of New Saint Westminster? University of Never Sing Worried? Uncle Ned Stopped Working? Use No Shredded Wires? Usually, Nora Stands Wide? US Navy Ships Wiggle? Unitarians Nary Sell Whiskey? Ultraviolet's Nice, Stop Whining? Under No Sircumstances Whimper? (Okay, that one was a stretch.)
Consider that not everyone just happens to know what a UNSW is.
"There shouldn't be separate standards for US users and the rest of the world."
Actually there should. Slashdot is a USian website and as such has a US context. Numbers should be formatted in the US way. Measurements should be given in units that make sense for the context in the US. Values should be given in US currency or the US currency equiv should be provided. And the term "common knowledge" should automatically be translated to "common knowledge in the US."
Nope. You lost me there.
Any chance of explaining it with cars?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I'm not sure if that's supposed to be a joke or not...! Anyway, the important thing is to pick your analogy to match the subject matter, which seems to escape many teachers, who try to chose their analogy based on "student interest". My dad taught the wave equation using tins of baked beans on a conveyor belt. I've seen other teachers use the analogy of watching fenceposts or telegraph poles flashing past from a moving car.
In both cases, the familiar physical example lets the student understand why frequency and wavelength are in inverse proportion to one another (wavelength goes up, frequency goes down and vice versa), which overcomes the natural assumption of "if one's big the other must be big".
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
No, Slashdot is a website. It has never been a US website, it is just a website that happens to be managed from the US. As far as I can see.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
No, BBC is a website. It has never been a UK website, it is just a website that happens to be managed from the UK. As far as I can see.
There is a US focused branch of the Guardian or the BBC just as their is a UK focused branch of Ebay and youtube. But the main site for all of these is targeted at either the US or the UK.
You use "a website" like a website is some magical international animal that is above nations. This isn't the truth. A website hosted and run from Sweden is a swedish website, etc. One has no right to complain about a swedish slant being found there, about swedish metrics being used, currency, etc. One who is swedish has every right to expect to find all of the above on said site.
I just finished the free Introduction to Networking offered by Stanford (which I also found out about via Slashdot)
Now I have signed up for this course. I think I fit a fairly typical hobbyist demographic - some very simple playing with BASIC, some Arduino hacking, but minimal formal programming experience.
It's a shame this course doesn't offer a certificate of accomplishment like the Stanford one does. We'vw all dealt with the HR dept that thinks certificates are more important than experience :-(
sustainable living
The BBC detects your country and customises itself to it. Certain sections let you choose which national/international view you want. But even then, it's very name has the word "British" in it. Where does Slashdot define it's nationality or target market? Has Slashdot ever analysed the demographics of its readers properly?
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'