I have tried some online lessons from Udacity and Coursera, and this is my impression so far:
The system of Udacity is great, but there is little content. Also, the content made by the founder Sebastian Thrun is great, but the content made by other authors is sometimes much less impressive.
For example, some authors don’t even read the feedback for their lessons. Sometimes they make a mistake in a lesson or in a test, the mistake is debated in the forum, and… one year later, the mistake is still there. They don’t even need to change the lesson video… just putting one paragraph of text below the video would be enough. (In one programming lesson, you had to pass a unit test, which sometimes mysteriously crashed. The crash wasn’t caused by something logical, like spending too much time or too much memory, it was a bug in the test. In the forum students gave each other advice how to avoid this bug. It probably could be fixed in 5 minutes, but the author didn’t care.) -- The lesson is, you can’t make online education just like “fire and forget”, but some authors probably underestimate this.
Coursera is the opposite: it has a lot of content, almost anything, but the system feels irritating to me. They don’t fully use the interactivity, which in my experience helps paying attention. For example, on Coursera you have five videos from 15 to 30 minutes, and then some homework. (Depending on the course.) On Udacity, the videos are interrupted every 2 or 3 minutes to ask you a simple question.
Some of the lessons require peer assessment, which means that you write your answers in plain text, and then you have to grade the answers of other users. Which is a waste of time, because of course it requires some redundancy, so have to fill the test, wait a week, and then read peer assessment guidelines and rate five random tests by other people… although in most cases it could be done automatically (by choosing an option, entering a number, or entering a string that is matched against a regexp). Very annoying. Also because of this, you have to take the class at the same time when everyone else does; if you try it a few months later, you don’t have the full experience.
Both sites provide free and paid certificates. With the paid certificate, you have some Skype exams to prove it was really you who did the lessons, the free certificate just means you do the exercises and receive a PDF. In Udacity, you can get the free certificate anytime. In Coursera, you get the free certificate only if you do the lesson at the same time as everyone else. Thus, if you are interested in a topic, and the lesson happened a year ago, you can do it… but you won’t even get the free certificate. I know the free certificates are only symbolic, but still, on Udacity I can get them for learning at my own pace, on Coursera there is a lot of lost purpose involved.
Thus… I wish all the content from Coursera to be ported to Udacity. Alternatively, Coursera switching to the system Udacity uses. Alternatively, someone else to combine the best aspects from both.
When I took Intro to Computer Science and Programming on edX from MIT (The original 16 week 6.00x before they broke it up into two courses), they broke up the short videos with “finger exercises” which was like the interrupting questions on Udacity, but there were more of them and they were a lot more comprehensive. It was worth enough of your grade so there was motivation to do them, but not so much that you couldn’t skip them if you felt you already really knew it. That was, to date, the best MOOC I’ve ever taken.
I agree that Coursera can sometimes feel a bit too much like copy/pasting a college class onto the internet, but it really does vary a lot by course. For example, Robert Ghrist’s Single-Variable Calculus on Coursera was amazing. 15 minute animated video lecture followed by 10 problem homework assignment.
As far as the scheduled vs self-paced difference, there are ups and downs to both. I have fallen behind in a class before and then abandoned it because I missed a deadline. But knowing that “now is your chance” to take a course can be more motivating than doing self-paced sometimes. Deadlines can be useful.
I really don’t know what’s best, but I’m a huge fan of the open education movement and I see innovations happening all the time. For example, each course in Coursera’s Data Science track has a “due date” for full credit, then a “hard due date”. Each day between them, your score on that assignment loses 10%. You have a total of 5 late days to apply throughout the course. That’s enough to save you if you fall off the wagon for a bit and knowing that you’re losing a bit each day can motivate you to get it done, while being unable to submit after missing the first “due date” can make you want to quit.
I guess different things work for different people, but for me deadlines are pure evil with no upsides. :(
It would be a bit better if I could make those lessons faster. Then I would just start a course, complete it in three days, and move on to the next course. But I hate the “now wait… now hurry… now wait… now hurry...” approach. I started once course when I had a lot of free time, did the first two lessons and then had to wait for a week. So I started another course meanwhile. Next two weeks, I was busy, so I missed a deadline for one assignment. Now I can’t get 100% completion, for no good reason.
I am considering a decision to simply never do a Coursera lesson on the schedule; only pick those lessons that already ended. Then I know I already missed all deadlines, so they become irrelevant. As a side effect, I will never get that free certificate. Which is perhaps good in some sense, because I will not be distracted by lost purposes.
Somehow the typical school system “learn 1 lesson of this, then 1 lesson of something unrelated, then 1 lesson of the first thing again” doesn’t work for me. When I start doing something, I want to continue doing it, and I hate being interrupted. I prefer long work followed by long breaks, not the constant turning on and off. Even the idea of using pomodoros is completely against my instincts. Curious how frequent this is.
You know, when you put it that way, I think you’re right. I do hate not being able to progress when I still have the energy to do so. I could have just been falling for the availability bias when thinking about times that I have scrambled to get something done before a deadline, thinking that that is the reason that I was able to stay on track.
If you do plan to go the archived courses route, maybe consider using something like Accredible to save and post your work as you go through. The idea behind that site is “Prove that you’ve actually done something”. Might be useful.
I have tried some online lessons from Udacity and Coursera, and this is my impression so far:
The system of Udacity is great, but there is little content. Also, the content made by the founder Sebastian Thrun is great, but the content made by other authors is sometimes much less impressive.
For example, some authors don’t even read the feedback for their lessons. Sometimes they make a mistake in a lesson or in a test, the mistake is debated in the forum, and… one year later, the mistake is still there. They don’t even need to change the lesson video… just putting one paragraph of text below the video would be enough. (In one programming lesson, you had to pass a unit test, which sometimes mysteriously crashed. The crash wasn’t caused by something logical, like spending too much time or too much memory, it was a bug in the test. In the forum students gave each other advice how to avoid this bug. It probably could be fixed in 5 minutes, but the author didn’t care.) -- The lesson is, you can’t make online education just like “fire and forget”, but some authors probably underestimate this.
Coursera is the opposite: it has a lot of content, almost anything, but the system feels irritating to me. They don’t fully use the interactivity, which in my experience helps paying attention. For example, on Coursera you have five videos from 15 to 30 minutes, and then some homework. (Depending on the course.) On Udacity, the videos are interrupted every 2 or 3 minutes to ask you a simple question.
Some of the lessons require peer assessment, which means that you write your answers in plain text, and then you have to grade the answers of other users. Which is a waste of time, because of course it requires some redundancy, so have to fill the test, wait a week, and then read peer assessment guidelines and rate five random tests by other people… although in most cases it could be done automatically (by choosing an option, entering a number, or entering a string that is matched against a regexp). Very annoying. Also because of this, you have to take the class at the same time when everyone else does; if you try it a few months later, you don’t have the full experience.
Both sites provide free and paid certificates. With the paid certificate, you have some Skype exams to prove it was really you who did the lessons, the free certificate just means you do the exercises and receive a PDF. In Udacity, you can get the free certificate anytime. In Coursera, you get the free certificate only if you do the lesson at the same time as everyone else. Thus, if you are interested in a topic, and the lesson happened a year ago, you can do it… but you won’t even get the free certificate. I know the free certificates are only symbolic, but still, on Udacity I can get them for learning at my own pace, on Coursera there is a lot of lost purpose involved.
Thus… I wish all the content from Coursera to be ported to Udacity. Alternatively, Coursera switching to the system Udacity uses. Alternatively, someone else to combine the best aspects from both.
When I took Intro to Computer Science and Programming on edX from MIT (The original 16 week 6.00x before they broke it up into two courses), they broke up the short videos with “finger exercises” which was like the interrupting questions on Udacity, but there were more of them and they were a lot more comprehensive. It was worth enough of your grade so there was motivation to do them, but not so much that you couldn’t skip them if you felt you already really knew it. That was, to date, the best MOOC I’ve ever taken.
I agree that Coursera can sometimes feel a bit too much like copy/pasting a college class onto the internet, but it really does vary a lot by course. For example, Robert Ghrist’s Single-Variable Calculus on Coursera was amazing. 15 minute animated video lecture followed by 10 problem homework assignment.
As far as the scheduled vs self-paced difference, there are ups and downs to both. I have fallen behind in a class before and then abandoned it because I missed a deadline. But knowing that “now is your chance” to take a course can be more motivating than doing self-paced sometimes. Deadlines can be useful.
I really don’t know what’s best, but I’m a huge fan of the open education movement and I see innovations happening all the time. For example, each course in Coursera’s Data Science track has a “due date” for full credit, then a “hard due date”. Each day between them, your score on that assignment loses 10%. You have a total of 5 late days to apply throughout the course. That’s enough to save you if you fall off the wagon for a bit and knowing that you’re losing a bit each day can motivate you to get it done, while being unable to submit after missing the first “due date” can make you want to quit.
I guess different things work for different people, but for me deadlines are pure evil with no upsides. :(
It would be a bit better if I could make those lessons faster. Then I would just start a course, complete it in three days, and move on to the next course. But I hate the “now wait… now hurry… now wait… now hurry...” approach. I started once course when I had a lot of free time, did the first two lessons and then had to wait for a week. So I started another course meanwhile. Next two weeks, I was busy, so I missed a deadline for one assignment. Now I can’t get 100% completion, for no good reason.
I am considering a decision to simply never do a Coursera lesson on the schedule; only pick those lessons that already ended. Then I know I already missed all deadlines, so they become irrelevant. As a side effect, I will never get that free certificate. Which is perhaps good in some sense, because I will not be distracted by lost purposes.
Somehow the typical school system “learn 1 lesson of this, then 1 lesson of something unrelated, then 1 lesson of the first thing again” doesn’t work for me. When I start doing something, I want to continue doing it, and I hate being interrupted. I prefer long work followed by long breaks, not the constant turning on and off. Even the idea of using pomodoros is completely against my instincts. Curious how frequent this is.
Hey, everyone! When you study, do you prefer to:
[pollid:727]
When you study multiple things, do you prefer to:
[pollid:728]
You know, when you put it that way, I think you’re right. I do hate not being able to progress when I still have the energy to do so. I could have just been falling for the availability bias when thinking about times that I have scrambled to get something done before a deadline, thinking that that is the reason that I was able to stay on track.
If you do plan to go the archived courses route, maybe consider using something like Accredible to save and post your work as you go through. The idea behind that site is “Prove that you’ve actually done something”. Might be useful.