

MOOC Stats and Trends in 2014 - krat0sprakhar
https://www.class-central.com/report/moocs-stats-and-trends-2014/

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krat0sprakhar
> There has been some debate whether MOOCs can be as useful for teaching
> humanities and non-technical subjects as it is for computer science and
> math.

I've only taken CS MOOCs till now and undoubtedly the programming assignments
have been the most interesting part. Recently, I've meaning to take a few
history courses and was wondering how engaging would the assignments in those
be.

Can someone who's taken any Humanities courses share their experience?

~~~
henrik_w
I have also taken programming MOOCs (algorithms 1 and 2, databases, and
computational investing), and the programming assignments are a good fit for
MOOCs - it's easy to check the result from running a program (for example, the
sizes of the five largest strongly connected components of a directed graph
consisting of almost one million nodes).

In the fall, I took Financial Markets (Yale, from Coursera). I don't know if
that qualifies as humanities or not, but it did have a peer-graded component
that worked better than expected. Each week there were multiple choice quiz
questions on the videos. But one week there was also a writing assignment. You
had to read a fairly technical paper on market efficiency, and then answer
three questions on it with max 300 words each.

After the deadline, you have to grade 5 other students answers (as in "Did
they summarize the main points correctly?"). This worked much better than I
expected. Summarizing the main points, and then reading through and grading 5
other answers really made the content stick. So I was actually pleasantly
surprised at how well it worked.

But I think it the peer reviewed writing works best when the assignment is a
fairly focused question to answer.

My reviews of the courses:

[http://henrikwarne.com/2012/05/08/coursera-algorithms-
course...](http://henrikwarne.com/2012/05/08/coursera-algorithms-course/)

[http://henrikwarne.com/2013/02/18/coursera-algorithms-
course...](http://henrikwarne.com/2013/02/18/coursera-algorithms-course-
part2/)

[http://henrikwarne.com/2011/12/18/introduction-to-
databases-...](http://henrikwarne.com/2011/12/18/introduction-to-databases-on-
line-learning-done-well/)

[http://henrikwarne.com/2015/01/01/coursera-course-review-
com...](http://henrikwarne.com/2015/01/01/coursera-course-review-
computational-investing-part-1/)

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henrik_w
2400+ MOOC courses, which is why it's good to have review sites. I like both
class-central.com and coursetalk.com.

