
2,400 MOOCs Starting in April - rodneyrdx
http://www.openculture.com/free_certificate_courses
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jarofgreen
It pains me to see pages like this. Someone has spent ages making this long
list by hand, then it's put up as a long blog post. No way to filter by
anything .... can we have it as machine workable Open Data please!

Also, think about ways to allow other people to contribute to the list so that
the work of keeping it up to date is shared out and not on just a few people.

~~~
dhawalhs
Actually, it wasn't generated by hand. I/Class Central generated it for
OpenCulture. Here is a more comprehensive list, with filtering:
[https://www.classcentral.com/starting-this-
month](https://www.classcentral.com/starting-this-month)

~~~
jarofgreen
That is a cool site! Good work.

Out of curiosity, where does the data come from and how do you make sure it's
kept up to date? And is your data Open Data?

~~~
dhawalhs
Thanks! We have scrapers running daily for all the major providers. The rest
we collect manually on a schedule. We have been around for a while, so in many
cases the providers or instructors reach out to us directly. Sorry, but it is
not open data.

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spectramax
I've always wondered: what is the incentive for colleges to put courses up for
free? I remember more than 10 years ago when MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) started
and at that time, I thought this is probably because MIT is well funded and
they can afford to put content up for free. Now we are here, 10 years later
and there is an abundance of free college courses - what are the incentives
for colleges to do this?

~~~
logicx24
Building name recognition and improving their brand. I think in the last ten
years, colleges have seen that MOOCS don't reduce the demand for the
traditional college experience, and have realized that creating their own
MOOCS is actually an effective to create a new pipeline of potential students.

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stewbrew
Such a list is almost worthless without some kind of quality assessment. I
skimmed through a few courses and they vary extremely in quality. Some are
made by often rather young lecturers who could have prepared better so that
they don't have to read their own name from a card. Others are presented by
well established researchers who also are excellent teachers. Some courses
cover only the basics with the result that in some fields there are a lot
courses with about the same content. Other courses go surprisingly deep. A
simple list doesn't help you to distinguish between good and bad courses.

~~~
dhawalhs
You can find reviews for these courses here:
[https://www.classcentral.com/starting-this-
month](https://www.classcentral.com/starting-this-month)

It's the same list, but more comprehensive.

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overcode
Based on my experience, apart from a handful (really a handful) of open
courses by elite universities (e.g. Harvard's Stats 110), the vast majority of
online courses are garbage - low quality of content, insufficient coverage of
the material, inappropriate format, bad teaching. I'm talking about almost
anything on Coursera/Udacity/Udemy. Even if the courses were good, you still
need to spend a good amount of time with a textbook and practice the subject.
And considering that most courses are useless, you're usually better off
skipping them altogether and getting straight to the book + practice approach
to learning.

~~~
adem
_> Even if the courses were good, you still need to spend a good amount of
time with a textbook and practice the subject._

I don't understand why anyone would expect otherwise? This is as close to the
university experience as it can get.

~~~
overcode
People fall into the trap of expecting otherwise, because otherwise is easier.
MOOC are often used as a shortcut rather than a legitimate way to learn about
a subject.

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paulcarroty
I've ended 3-4 MOOC courses and then switch to LinkedIn/Lynda & Udemy 'cause
quality is much higher. Can recommend MOOC courses only when you see a well-
known lecturer.

~~~
luigi23
Can you recommend some of these uploaded on linkedin/lynda/udemy?

~~~
paulcarroty
* [https://www.udemy.com/react-the-complete-guide-incl-redux/](https://www.udemy.com/react-the-complete-guide-incl-redux/)

* [https://www.udemy.com/coding-interview-bootcamp-algorithms-a...](https://www.udemy.com/coding-interview-bootcamp-algorithms-and-data-structure/)

* [https://www.lynda.com/learning-paths/Business/become-a-small...](https://www.lynda.com/learning-paths/Business/become-a-small-business-owner)

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hackandtrip
It's updated! My university (Politecnico di Milano) has an increasing number
of MOOCs but still quite small, and all the new ones on FPGA design are on the
platform.

Also, classcentral.com has an amazing list of reviews that are really useful
in seeing the difficulty of MOOCs.

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gvand
If I had MOOCs when I was a student... one of the best ideas of this decade.

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RickJWagner
This is awesome! My hope is that MOOCs will eventually lead to much-needed
reform in higher education.

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agumonkey
did a fair bit of MOOCs when they popped up (coursera etc) it was really
really nice, I wonder what changed since ..

