
Ask HN: Courses  like Coursera or Udemy but without the videos? - rgovind
Hi All,<p>Happy new year.<p>As of 2016, I realised that video based courses in Coursera and Udemy are not ideal and are a drain on efficiency. You cannot skim through content in videos and you are constantly wondering what you will miss if you forward the video. You will have to adjust to lecturer&#x27;s speed rather than choose your own speed. You cannot listen to videos in noisy environments.<p>What I would like to see is repository of paid (or free) tutorials, which uses text and pictures to convey information rather than videos.  Googling only shows scattered tutorials, but not the equivalent of Coursera. If anyone here please knows of such a resource, please let me know.
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RogerL
Lorena Barba at GW agrees with you (and so do I). Here is one of her MOOCs:
[http://openedx.seas.gwu.edu/courses/GW/MAE6226/2014_spring/a...](http://openedx.seas.gwu.edu/courses/GW/MAE6226/2014_spring/about)

She uses python & Jupyter Notebook to present the course, not video, for the
reasons you mentioned. She is one of the people who got me started writing my
book in Jupyter Notebook (mine is not part of a MOOC).

I'm pretty sure that what you are looking for doesn't exist in large scale.
Someone already mentioned this, but probably the MIT OCW is the closest (many
classes have no video, only lecture notes).

~~~
jimbosis
The link for MIT OpenCourseWare:
[http://ocw.mit.edu/index.htm](http://ocw.mit.edu/index.htm)

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edtechdev
I usually learn best when there is a reason, an immediate benefit, for doing
so. Find a project that interests you and start working on it. You'll see what
you need to learn more about to get it done, and that provides the motivation
and context for learning it.

If that's not enough or too hard, find someone who knows what you want to
learn, and talk with them, work with them.

Sorry if that's vague, but provide some more details about what you want to
learn and/or your goals, and more help can be provided.

But your intuitions are right - video is not ideal at all for learning. Most
people stop watching after the first 4-6 minutes
([http://blog.edx.org/optimal-video-length-student-
engagement](http://blog.edx.org/optimal-video-length-student-engagement)). See
also:
[http://linkis.com/papers.ssrn.com/sol3/mYfya](http://linkis.com/papers.ssrn.com/sol3/mYfya)
[http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/in-online-courses-
stu...](http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/in-online-courses-students-
learn-more-by-doing-than-by-watching/57365)
[http://www.wired.com/2015/08/learning-physics-tough-get-
used...](http://www.wired.com/2015/08/learning-physics-tough-get-used/)
[http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2015/07/01/why...](http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2015/07/01/why-
my-mooc-is-not-built-on-video/) [http://pgbovine.net/publications/edX-MOOC-
video-production-a...](http://pgbovine.net/publications/edX-MOOC-video-
production-and-engagement_LAS-2014.pdf)
[http://www.tonybates.ca/2012/03/10/pedagogical-roles-for-
vid...](http://www.tonybates.ca/2012/03/10/pedagogical-roles-for-video-in-
online-learning/)

~~~
rgovind
>> usually learn best when there is a reason, an immediate benefit, for doing
so. Find a project that interests you and start working on it. You'll see what
you need to learn more about to get it done, and that provides the motivation
and context for learning it. If that's not enough or too hard, find someone
who knows what you want to learn, and talk with them, work with them.

I know what you are saying. But, I am not able to find someone in my immediate
circle who can teach me to become good at CSS. I have various web projects in
mind, I have the motivation and need to learn to it. Thats how I started doing
MOOC in web development. Unfortunately, I find that it is very inefficient.
Plus finding courses which are aimed at intermediate skill people is tough(For
example I know all CSS properties, but cannot use them coherently to take care
of rough edges).

~~~
cjcenizal
"Learning CSS" is a pretty broad topic. Have you checked out
[http://cssguidelin.es](http://cssguidelin.es)? It's pretty high level. For
some fun stuff you could also check out flexboxpatterns.com (I'm the author).

------
dimva
I think this is because it's much easier to lecture in front of a camera than
to spend time creating an easy-to-follow tutorial with illustrations. Compare
the number of professors who lecture undergraduates with the number who write
textbooks or blog posts for the general public.

------
dudul
> paid (or free) tutorials, which uses text and pictures to convey information
> rather than videos.

Isn't it called a "book"? :)

I'm with you, I often find videos on Coursera et all pretty useless and
inefficient. More effective for me to just buy a book on the topic I want to
learn about.

~~~
RogerL
No, a book is called a "book", and a class is not a book.

Classes entail teaching, homework, grades, a final exam, and TAs. You are
supported in your learning efforts.

A few books/textbooks are structured for self-learning, but most are not. Just
picking up a textbook on fluid dynamics (say) and expecting to work through it
without support and guided practice is a pipe dream for all but the most
dedicated autodidact.

~~~
ghaff
I think the parent was deliberately being a bit snarky but, in all fairness,
MOOCs (and related examples of learning at low cost/high scale) are generally
pretty weak in terms of supporting learning efforts. Autograding for some
programming assignments works pretty well but, in general, I'm not sure most
online courses I've seen work all that much better than books and multimedia.

------
Adam_O
Reading the replies in this thread got me thinking it would be nice if an
online course site allowed searching within all the subtitles of all the
videos it hosts, and would provide results to all videos containing the
searched keyword so you could get access to many explanations and side-notes
about a concept, fast.. I think it goes against their business model though.

Also, many MOOCs do support optional texts, but they are not always free.

Perhaps the right mix is somewhere down the middle.. a course that gives you
all the course materials in a jupyter notebook + makes help videos available
as well, and the student can pick their desired learning path (like
[http://cs109.github.io/2015/pages/videos.html](http://cs109.github.io/2015/pages/videos.html))

Finally, I really like those "Manga guide to" books from No Starch Press, but
they are more like fun supplementary resources.

~~~
bphogan
> it would be nice if an online course site allowed searching within all the
> subtitles of all the videos it hosts,

Yes it would. But a lot of the videos I see are not subtitled. They should be
though, for accessibility purposes.

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vikp
This is very specific to data science for now, but I'm working on Dataquest
([https://www.dataquest.io](https://www.dataquest.io)), which has interactive
explanations and diagrams. It's almost entirely reading theory and
explanations + writing code. It's hard to get broad coverage like
udemy/coursera, but it's a problem we'd love to work on in the future.

I've liked scotch.io for some dev things, and thinkster.io for some
Angular/frontend.

Also check out these IPython notebooks for a ton of topics:
[https://github.com/ipython/ipython/wiki/A-gallery-of-
interes...](https://github.com/ipython/ipython/wiki/A-gallery-of-interesting-
IPython-Notebooks) .

------
relkor
If you are willing to wait 8 weeks, my budding company is building a search
engine for explanations of things that could help you find what you are
looking for. I too have had this problem in finding educational resources, and
we are working to improve on the usual googleing experience. I cannot promise
much right now, but you are not alone in your search. Let me know if you would
like a beta key?

~~~
relkor
As I mentioned above, we are some weeks out from having an MVP. Our current
sprint is actually building a frontend for the search engine. If you are still
interested, please send me an email (in profile) and I will ping you back in
about 2 weeks when we have something for you to interact with.

------
zhte415
I agree. The key reason is the need for the audience to be linear. That's what
I'm addressing in the LMS I'm putting together for my company ;)

* Videos really do add a lot of value. But all video... makes it into a movie, despite exercises that can be done later, it is a movie experience.

* Videos create a personal touch and engagement with a user. That is valuable for a lot of people.

* Video in something technical lets others see workflow. I great example was for a beginner introduction to Spring where the instructor showed how to set getters and setters in Eclipse. Fantastic quick kill in terms of delivering something useful that wouldn't work in text.

* A lot of instructors don't like putting their face on the internet. They just don't.

* A combination of media all on one page is what I'm going for, and have mainly achieved. It does turn the page a bit long (of course assisted by sidebars) but text, video example, some interactive content, some links to resources be it citations, PDFs or other, work very well.

At least, for me.

And I'm doing this in a second language, Chinese. Nightmare, but really
interesting. If you're in the LMS space and interested in getting in contact,
email me at my QQ address in profile.

------
FanaHOVA
What works for me is playing the vids at 1.75x speed when I feel like there
isn't a high density of concepts being explained. Sometimes I just watch them
at 1.25x the whole time because the lecturer is slow paced. Try experiment
with this stuff and see if it's just the video format that you don't like or
the speed in which it's served.

------
bayesianhorse
One point of MOOCs is that they are not text books. That does not mean text
books are bad or that MOOCs are all you'll ever want.

Some MOOCs create video content totally "from scratch", but usually they build
on the lecturers' ability to hold a lecture in the topic, often honed through
years of repeated lecturing on the same topic.

~~~
wernercd
You can be text based learning without being a text book.

I'd like to see less emphasis on Video learning, because it definitely has
it's limits. Even if a teacher is good at it, through years of experience.

Not saying I don't like them per-se, but they don't seem to stick for me.

------
abustamam
I totally agree with you. I was a video person up until a few days ago
actually, when I bought React Indie Bundle (which came with 4 books and 3
Udemy courses). I found myself in a lot of situations where I could not watch
videos but I could read (i.e. when I would be without my computer). So I
became more of a book person. I'd read concepts, and see if I can apply the
concepts when I get to my computer.

I found it to be a more enriching learning experience over copying what
someone does on a video and only kind of learning it.

However, to answer your question, there are some free courses like the famous
Rails Tutorial [1] and Learn X the Hard way [2].

[1]: [https://www.railstutorial.org/book](https://www.railstutorial.org/book)

[2]: [http://learnpythonthehardway.org/](http://learnpythonthehardway.org/)

------
itg
Look at university websites for the courses you're interested and get the
recommended textbooks. Sometimes the professor will also have slides posted
online.

~~~
kaybe
Or, if you're lucky, they have also published a lecture script online which
may have book quality. You can also try asking if it's known to exist but not
available.

------
arikrak
I thought along similar lines [1] so I created Learneroo.com to teach
programming and more with interactive tutorials. I currently don't have time
to add additional courses or to create more visual content, but you can
explore what's there. (I'm still interested in finding someone to develop
content for it or even take over part of the site.)

[1] You can read some of my posts on topic at
[https://www.learneroo.com/blog](https://www.learneroo.com/blog)

------
lovelearning
Every Coursera course I've taken had associated notes and presentations. Some
were prepared by the professors or TAs themselves, while others were by fellow
students and put up in the forums. Coursera forums are goldmines - if you are
not in the habit of participating there, you are missing out on a lot.

~~~
dudul
All the courses I took had such notes, true. But I often found that they were
of poor quality, sometimes completely outdated compared to the video.

------
seanconnor
Saylor Academy (disclosure: I work there), mentioned also by StrawberryPi on
this thread, consists of free content curated into complete certificate
courses. Video makes an appearance, but does not dominate.

We are a small non-profit focused on open education; everything is open to
browse at [https://learn.saylor.org](https://learn.saylor.org) so it's easy to
get a sense of what one can expect from our courses.

Topics include CS, business, art history, bio, chem, physics, poli sci,
economics, and a few others, comprising about 100 courses in all.

And for anyone who wants to hack on their own, we have about 200 inactive
courses that can be forked on GitHub:
[https://legacy.saylor.org](https://legacy.saylor.org)

------
revorad
I'm building a new online learning site and this is one piece of feedback I
have received a lot. So I'm working on multiple formats, including text, audio
and video. Our first course on Rubymotion is entirely in text and will be
launching soon.

Please check it out if you are interested -
[http://learnetto.com](http://learnetto.com). Also feel free to email me with
any comments and feedback - hrishimittal@gmail.com

------
DYZT
Do you know of this website?
[http://handwrittentutorials.com](http://handwrittentutorials.com)

~~~
kevindeasis
Nice concept, brutal font. The owner might want to change the UI/UX. Doing so
might increase growth.

------
pshyco
Problem with Coursera / Udemy is they just scratch the surface. Almost all
courses are introductory and don't go into depth.

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jharohit
MIT OCW? Also I think edX has really well done videos(and video controls) as
compared to Coursera or Udemy.

------
omarshaikh
Packt Publishing has great books to jump start on many technologies. The books
are written by programmers, for programmers. They have a library subscription
that I use.

[https://www.packtpub.com/](https://www.packtpub.com/)

~~~
psibi
I'm not so sure about the quality of the recent Packt books. They seem to be
concentrating more on quantity rather than quality. I was approached by them
to write a book on a topic that I wasn't good at!

Also incidents[0] like this don't really make a good impression about them.

[0]:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/1rj2jq/book_haskel...](https://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/1rj2jq/book_haskell_financial_data_modeling_and/)

~~~
sotojuan
Packt has always had a bad signal to noise ratio. The sheer amount of books
they publish should be a warning sign.

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afarrell
I'm almost done with a short course on saltstack. If you're interested in
automated configuration management, I'd like feedback once I'm done with this
first draft of it.

------
jafingi
Pluralsight, while not free, has transcripts for most of their courses. So you
can essentially search what is said in the videos, and see what you miss if
you forward.

------
dhawalhs
CMUs's Open Learning Initiative might we worth looking at -
[http://oli.cmu.edu/](http://oli.cmu.edu/)

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StrawberryPi
Saylor has a lot of moocs that are very reading heavy.
[http://www.saylor.org/](http://www.saylor.org/)

------
elharezmi
"rich" javascript animation with free textbook(access just via course
registered for within restricet course time)

~~~
rgovind
I am not sure I follow. Can you please elaborate.

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Artemis2
Take a look at Tuts+: [http://tutsplus.com/](http://tutsplus.com/)

~~~
rgovind
I don't understand this website. It still seems like video based learning. Am
I missing something?

~~~
alashley
They have some text-based tutorials here:
[https://code.tutsplus.com/](https://code.tutsplus.com/)

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gauravgupta
Have you tried [http://hackr.io](http://hackr.io)?

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neilmack
I'm not being flippant, but it sounds like what you're looking for is ... a
book.

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hgllnt
What you're describing sounds a lot like a microlearning product we're in the
process of building at Hello Code
([https://hellocode.io](https://hellocode.io)). Stay tuned!

------
agumonkey
I was thinking, without videos, classes are mostly test-suite based
gamification.

