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."

Comments

You get what you put in

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:You get what you put in

[Hylandr]

Certificates, or degrees for that matter, are over-rated and doesn't hint at all at a person's deductive reasoning.

Re:You get what you put in

[i.r.id10t]

Depends on how the grades for the courses the degree/certificate were decided on. Project based learning and minimal exams and good grades? Probably have something going for ya... grading based on multiple choice tests? No proof of any skill/capability...

Re:You get what you put in

[cwsumner]

Certificates, or degrees for that matter, are over-rated and doesn't hint at all at a person's deductive reasoning.

That is often true. But if they pick up anything from the course it is not wasted.
And it does prove that they actually finished -something- ! 8-)

Grading

[wisnoskij]

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.

There was no failure of communication

[Anonymous Coward]

"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.

Retracted his stupidity

[thegarbz]

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.

Re:What's the point?

[Zontar The Mindless]

...a decent wiki system...

Oxymoron alert.

Re:What's the point?

[epine]

... a decent use of the word oxymoron ...

Recursive oxymoron alert alert.