

Free online CS courses from Udactiy & Coursera starting over the next 2 weeks - dhawalhs
https://plus.google.com/b/107809899089663019971/107809899089663019971/posts/PRVMrgLYTF1

======
milesstevenson
I almost feel as if it isn't fair. My university offers none of these things
at the undergraduate level -- compilers isn't even offered at all. Although I
am an advocate of this paradigm shift taking place, and am happy to be alive
during a time where radical changes to education are surely to be made, these
courses being offered make me really have second thoughts about putting all my
time towards my university's summer courses to graduate as soon as I can. I
hope they don't start charging by the time I finish undergrad.

TLDR: i jelly

~~~
Homunculiheaded
why not work within the system you're in? At my university a bunch of grad
students got together wanting to do ml/pgm/nlp-class, so we put together a
small group, added a semester project plus paper presentations to make it
worthy of a grad class. It's a bummer that the coursera courses started so
late, but otherwise it's working out great. We help each other out and teach
each other new stuff, and in the end get credit ;)

If you can't get departmental approval for something like that, then you
should at least be able to swing an easily justifiable independent study out
of one of the free classes.

~~~
milesstevenson
That's a damn good idea. Gonna ask my advisor about it Monday.

------
Horace
One other website that people might find interesting is MITx's program.
<http://mitx.mit.edu/> So far, I've tried Coursera and Udacity. Udacity: 1\.
Of the classes I took, only Udacity had programming exercises. For one of my
friends, who had never taken programming, the course managed to capture his
interest.

Udacity's courseload is:

i: video followed by a short quiz(multiple choice, fill in the blank, etc.) or
a programming exercise(Create a function that takes 2 numbers and outputs the
bigger one, etc.) There are generally anywhere from 25-40 videos, each 30
seconds to 4 minutes long.

ii: A series of homework assignments. These can be either quizzes or
programming tasks. You can submit them, but you don't know whether you got it
correct until some deadline, when your homework is graded. THe programming
exercises are quite a bit harder.

One of the ones my friend struggled with for a while was a task to build a
function that checked whether a sudoku square was valid when entered in a
certain format. iii: At the end of each week, there is a time where they have
some kind of IRC/audio channel set up, and you can ask them questions live.

2\. All the courses are the same quality. Also, they seem to truly have
adapted learning into a digital environment, as opposed to certain other
places, like MIT's OpenCourseware

Coursera, on the other hand, seems to be a series of lectures that they then
overlaid questions on too.

Some teachers' classes are quite obviously just lectures, with some quizzes
added on as an afterthought, while other teachers have incorporated them quite
nicely. Coursera, my guess is, will also probably have more courses on offer
than Udacity soon, since it's a collaboration between several schools.

TLDR: Try them both. I personally prefer Udacity, but there's no harm in
signing up for one and then dropping it.

~~~
lawnchair_larry
_Coursera, on the other hand, seems to be a series of lectures that they then
overlaid questions on too._

It sounds like you haven't really looked at Coursera? It has assignments,
including programming assignments.

------
carlsednaoui
Shameless plug but here is something similar I am currently working on:
<http://coursebacon.com/>

------
florestan
Can very much recommend the Udacity's courses. They are well planned and a big
plus is that the homework spans from quite easy task, to some rather
difficult.

------
MaxGabriel
I will also add that if you're finding scheduling conflicts to be a problem
with finishing homework, Udacity is offering CS101 and CS373 without homework
deadlines. [http://www.udacity-forums.com/cs373/questions/34839/we-
are-l...](http://www.udacity-forums.com/cs373/questions/34839/we-are-looking-
for-feedback-about-next-run-of-these-courses)

~~~
ISloop
Who grades the homework assignments?

~~~
MaxGabriel
They're graded by a computer program. Usually you are writing function(s) and
need to return a correct value.

As CS373 progressed it got more complex: you worked from some helper code
(like a matrix class) and had multiple test cases to test your program.

------
marlek
Are there any repercussions on choosing more courses and then dropping some
after a couple of weeks? I guess it will be hard following more than two with
college semester coming to an end, but I like at least 4 or 5 of these online
courses and I'd like to see how some of them are going for a few weeks

~~~
evoxed
There are none. I've signed up for everything that looked interesting two
months ago and have been active in... 6 of them (counting CS101 that just
finished). The rest I'm glad to have registered for since I can still keep up
with the materials and lectures without doing the assignments.

------
joshontheweb
I signed up for the 'build a web browser' class. Sounds like a fun challenge
to write a HTML and js parser

~~~
melipone
Which class is that? udacity or coursera?

~~~
Mutinix
Udacity. <http://www.udacity.com/overview/Course/cs262>

------
lunchladydoris
When these courses started coming out I was very excited. Now that there are
so many of them, I find myself being interested in too many and being
paralyzed by excessive choice, to the point that I've gone back to good old
books for my self-learning.

~~~
ramkalari
It boils down to choosing the top 2 courses. It's difficult to do beyond that
if you have a day job. One can still score high on the exams but you will have
very little time left to reflect on the material.

------
barfoomoo
I am in a fix after seeing Coursera's list of classes as to whether to take
the automata class or the compiler one? Any opinions on this? I have not done
both at university level as I am a self taught programmer.

------
barfoomoo
Any opinion on Udacity's compiler classes versus Coursera's? There is a gap of
one week between them, so we can try both and choose the one that suits us,
but still, any gut feel?

~~~
dhawalhs
I feel like Udacity's compiler class would be more practical and more entry
level as compared to Coursera. Its target audience are the people who finished
the recently concluded CS101 course. Coursera's version would be more
theoretical, thorough and closer to a Stanford level undergraduate class.
Coursera's version has midterms as well exams. So I feel like it would be
around 10 weeks long as compared to 7 weeks for Udacity.

Like you I plan to try both of them and ideally finish both of them. I am also
waiting on them to announce a part 2 of the Data Structure and Algorithm
class.

~~~
barfoomoo
Thanks for chipping in. I am leaning towards the Coursera one after reading
your comment.

------
shawnps
Is there anything like Udacity/Coursera for non-CS courses? I'd love to do
some Advanced Japanese.

