Coursera used to be good, and I've found the occasional good course on Udemy, but neither are particularly great right now in my opinion. Well curated learning materials are such a unicorn.
There are plenty of good courses and many of the courses are the same that have been there for years (Medical Neuroscience is incredible), it's just behind a paywall now and you can't audit them (unless I'm retarded and missing something, which is fully possible).
I’ve purchased many Udemy courses over the years. The subscription plan they’ve been pushing makes no sense financially. I hope I’m wrong but I worry that eventually being a subscriber will be the only thing they offer.
Yes! I have had unfettered access to it via a couple employers and the Illusion of Choice is real. The best thing they could do (for users like me, not sure if this is true for the majority) would be to go back to being a curator of quality and not a marketplace for anyone to make a course.
There was one course I did gor mongoose, muber I think it's called. I really liked it as a student because it's all very bite-sized and you could stop/start whenever. They do recaps at the beginning.
Compare that to a 6 hr video on YouTube, next day you already forgot what the timestamp was about.
It's been a while since I took a Coursera course but I LOVED it at the beginning. Between Machine Learning, the (numerical) optimisation courses and NAND-To-Tetris (even for the platform alone) it had so many great courses to pick from.
I did Andrew Ng's old Machine Learning, Obarsky's Scala course, the Ng's Deep Learning specialization, Nand to Tetris part 1 and a small Data Science course which wasn't very good. I think my very first course was "Model Thinking" course, but I never took the exam there.
I also tried the sequel to the Scala course at one point, and the Cryptography course, but I dropped out from those after finding out they were a bit too hard - I spent way more time on the coursework than I'd intended.
But I can't say I like the direction it's taken in recent years.
The model thinking course was interesting but it should have had a follow up that was much more than a freshman survey course treatment of each model.
Reading online it seems like most people got the impression that it was establishing that all models are essentially useless. Instead it was showing that each of these models were an extremely efficient way to understand some dynamic situations, but that it’s still absurd to focus on only one model when trying to understand the world.
Didn’t the gamification course have one of the relatively few well done peer assessments? The course was good, but it’s interesting now that gamification features completely turn me off now on any platform or program attempting to motivate me toward a specific end, regardless of whether that goal is in my interest or the interest of someone else trying to make money.
Agreed about Odersky, the Scala course and the Scala Functional Programming course were solid (the latter a bit less so, a blemish was its insistence on Akka, but the concepts were interesting).
There was also a very interesting introduction to Programming Languages (by Dan... something? He was from the University of Washington I think) which covered multiple paradigms and had interesting things to say about the ML family.
Coursera used to be great, the value was unparalleled. Great specializations too; I learned Python and data science techniques through the platform during the COVID pandemic.
Lately though they've been pushing for courses to have AI dialogue modules, where an AI agent asks you questions about the content. These modules are absolute slop garbage, often asking repetitive questions that have no grounding in actual course content. I got sick of this and dropped my subscription about a month ago.
I've used both platforms regularly over the years, and I have mixed feelings about both. I mean they both have some truly excellent content, but so much utter trash. There should be some kind of quality control.
They make it reaaaaally hard to find the good stuff. Many courses are time sensitive (e.g. there's no point in learning a 20 year old version of PHP), but they frequently lie about when a course was created which makes it impossible to filter out old stuff.
There are so many courses that could benefit from more interactive tests/quizzes, but it's usually limited to solving a few ridiculously simple multiple choice questions. I'm not sure if that's a platform limitation or a course creator limitation.
So much of the content is extremely stale, and it even matters for languages that you would think are relatively unchanging.
It seems like they must have put almost no incentives in place for the instructors. Setting up a course must take even more effort than running a full semester course in their own school, but since no one is making new versions Coursera must not be paying them like it, or offering equity in the platform. I imagine that teaching students in person is also a lot more rewarding,
I haven’t taken any recent online courses, but EdX looked like it might still be good.
We have free coursera at work. But I really hate it because it enforces random deadlines on you. Even though the courses are completely prerecorded and absolutely don't need any kind of deadlines. I just want to study at my own pace.
If they don't force it people won't complete the course. While that at first sounds good - they collect money - long term people who complete courses are your best marketing as they tell others and so completion is importation and thus the deadlines.
Though how much force is best is subject to debate.
> long term people who complete courses are your best marketing as they tell others and so completion is importation and thus the deadlines
I don't see why completing courses is a customer satisfaction criterion. I've had many courses that I didn't complete, yet I was quite satisfied with the content and could recommend it to friends.
But at the same time I agree that they aren't doing enough to surface the high quality courses
Compare that to a 6 hr video on YouTube, next day you already forgot what the timestamp was about.
I also tried the sequel to the Scala course at one point, and the Cryptography course, but I dropped out from those after finding out they were a bit too hard - I spent way more time on the coursework than I'd intended.
But I can't say I like the direction it's taken in recent years.
Reading online it seems like most people got the impression that it was establishing that all models are essentially useless. Instead it was showing that each of these models were an extremely efficient way to understand some dynamic situations, but that it’s still absurd to focus on only one model when trying to understand the world.
"Model Thinking" was great!
And I really liked the gamification course by Kevin Werbach (The topic was still hot back then) - something I used extensively at my start up.
There was also a very interesting introduction to Programming Languages (by Dan... something? He was from the University of Washington I think) which covered multiple paradigms and had interesting things to say about the ML family.
It isn't about competition, but rather getting market dominance early. =3
So to add Udemy's infinite catalogue of poorly structured courses, it only adds to the decline
They make it reaaaaally hard to find the good stuff. Many courses are time sensitive (e.g. there's no point in learning a 20 year old version of PHP), but they frequently lie about when a course was created which makes it impossible to filter out old stuff.
There are so many courses that could benefit from more interactive tests/quizzes, but it's usually limited to solving a few ridiculously simple multiple choice questions. I'm not sure if that's a platform limitation or a course creator limitation.
It seems like they must have put almost no incentives in place for the instructors. Setting up a course must take even more effort than running a full semester course in their own school, but since no one is making new versions Coursera must not be paying them like it, or offering equity in the platform. I imagine that teaching students in person is also a lot more rewarding,
I haven’t taken any recent online courses, but EdX looked like it might still be good.
I also hate all the gamification.
Though how much force is best is subject to debate.
I don't see why completing courses is a customer satisfaction criterion. I've had many courses that I didn't complete, yet I was quite satisfied with the content and could recommend it to friends.