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Coursera Relaunches Classic Computer Science Courses (i-programmer.info)
"Many of the Computer Science courses that we feared had been assigned to the scrapheap have reappeared in Coursera's catalog," reports i-programmer.info.
Slashdot reader mikejuk shares this update on his original story:
Coursera has a list of 90 courses that have transitioned to the new platform since the old one shut on June 30th and it includes 25 Computer Science ones and the all important [Geoffrey] Hinton course on neural networks. Most of the courses are free but there are no certificates of completion or anything else. While they have specified start dates and cohorts of students will be encouraged to complete them within a set number of weeks, without graded assignments there may not be the same impetus as for the original courses or as for newer courses designed specifically for the new platform.
Coursera says "As has always been our intention, we are working diligently to relaunch the vast majority of the courses from our old platform on the new one." i-programmer.info has apparently removed their original article, and their reporter writes that "I am now willing to retract my accusation of 'cultural vandalism'... Why [Coursera] managed to convey the opposite impression for such a long time may just have been a failure of communication."
Coursera says "As has always been our intention, we are working diligently to relaunch the vast majority of the courses from our old platform on the new one." i-programmer.info has apparently removed their original article, and their reporter writes that "I am now willing to retract my accusation of 'cultural vandalism'... Why [Coursera] managed to convey the opposite impression for such a long time may just have been a failure of communication."
Does the all-new all-singing all-dancing coursera work regardless of browser?
One of the reasons I stopped bothering was the continuous, incessant, and endless, hopelessly losing fight "to keep up with the platform". The first three courses were fine doable on my C7 1.5GHz, but that soon ended. I had to buy new hardware (E6600), upgrade browsers, switch browsers, upgrade again, switch again, and in fact I had to use two or three concurrently to do the assignments and the other things within the same course. And the videos? No option but to fetch them and use mplayer. Because playing them in a browser, any browser, just wasn't doable.
That sucked so massively that pretty soon I had my fill and I bailed out. Basically all the "platforms" had this ailment to some extent. It's a poor way to try and reach as many people as you can. But at least it keeps your webmonkeys busy doing the everlatest thing every day, innit.
Regardless of the grades, you will only get out of a course what you put into it, especially if you don't pay. Regardless of the means of evaluation, a person who invests their time heavily into a learning activity will gain a lot. Grading/evaluation/feedback costs money; if you want a certificate pay for it.
I am not sure what these courses do, if anything, to at least let you know if you are failing or succeeding at learning the material. But a lot of the computer science courses I took had automatic grading. They had an online script capable of testing the correctness of submitted executables.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Just set up a decent wiki system tailored to communicating a subject to students.
You mean we're going back to software that doesn't need gigabytes and 50% of the CPU just sitting there?
"Why [Coursera] managed to convey the opposite impression for such a long time may just have been a failure of communication."
Coursera kept saying most of the courses were coming back. If people refused to believe them, there was no failure of communication, only lack of faith. Reading some of these discussions, you could always tell that what they were saying had nothing to do with Coursera's statements and everything to do with their decision -- unwarranted, apparently -- to hate Coursera no matter what.
He should have retracted his comments regardless of what happened. Having a company stop hosting content for free, with notice, and allowing people to archive a copy of the content before hand is not and never was cultural vandalism.
Their reporter was just an over entitled twat who needed to reach his clickbait quota. If he cared at all he would have downloaded all the culture and preserved a copy.