

Ask HN: have you ever seriously learnt something through online courses? - camillomiller

Have you ever learnt a trade or the basis of what became your trade (or part of it) through an online course? 
I feel very compelled to start some courses on Udemy, since they&#x27;re cheap as hell. Comments all look very positive, but I still can&#x27;t understand if it will be time well spent.
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xiaoma
Yes: [http://logicmason.com/2013/self-directed-programming-and-
com...](http://logicmason.com/2013/self-directed-programming-and-computer-
science-study-through-moocs/)

I've taken dozens of courses on Coursera, have nearly completed my first edX
course. What I've found works best for me is to learn relatively self-
contained things, such as the Scala programming language, on Coursera / edX.
For general CS/math courses, I don't find the classes as useful. There are too
many issues with unspoken, inaccurate or unclear prereqs. Additionally, the
courses force you to work at a steady pace, which often slows me down in some
stretches and then eventually forces me to drop out if work gets busy.
Additionally, some courses are significantly watered down.

Taking classes from MIT (or any school with a good selection) on Open
Courseware fixes all of these problems. You do the exact same work as students
did, you can see the same lectures, and you take the same exams. All of it is
at your own pace. Best of all MIT knows very well which of its own classes are
prereqs of its own classes, so the whole headache of jumping into courses you
don't have the tools to take on is avoided, too.

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brudgers
I've become a bit of a MOOC head. The best analagy is:

    
    
        MOOC platform  => Library 
        MOOC course    => Textbook
    

The value differentiation is in the learning community. Self paced platforms
add little - e.g. MIT OCW appears to have a lower success than its brand and
instructor quality suggest. The tradeoff is in coarse flexibility. A learning
community requires calendar scale synchronization, but can still be
asynchronous at the finer scale of the clock.

Another way of looking at it is as correspondence school. That's the
University of Phoenix model. It suggests a track record of producing larger
scale educational outcomes - degrees - rather than immediate vocational
retraining via online distance learning platforms.

At the other end there's Codecademy. Basically, structured interactive
tutorials. While offering vocational training, they are less likely to serve
as a qualification.

Anyway, my experience is primarily on Coursera. It has been that I come out
with a better understanding of computer science and programming, But any
immediate vocational improvement is directly proportional to the time actually
spent implementing the ideas in code - e.g. I took a course that reccommend
EMACS and my 'skill' in EMACS is a result of many days using it.

Good luck.

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turnip1979
I've token a few courses on coursera for free. Did some useful stuff with that
knowledge.

I've spent a few hundred bucks on tech related courses and the value I've
derived isn't direct. I enjoyed the courses and it keeps my tech skills
current - I consider that a hobby expense as opposed to an investment expense.

You correctly identified time as a key parameter. I've signed up for dozens of
coursera courses and not finished them. Those are free so no big deal. It
would suck a bit more to pay cash for courses and not finish them.

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justplay
Yes definitely.

Just because of this thing, I am currently employed. The people who didn't
took such courses seriously are currently suffering or lacking of good job.

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milkcircle
It can be done, but you have to remember to set strict deadlines for yourself,
or else it will be a waste of time.

Without the pressure of grades going on your transcript, it can get
exceedingly difficult to push yourself to finish all of the assignments, and
there are few incentives against quitting after getting frustrated. This is
why college courses work so well for so many people: good university
transcripts are far more important than the certificates that online courses
might offer.

Harvard's CS50x released some interesting stats after its first year. Of over
100,000 people who signed up, only 11% submitted the first and easiest problem
set. Of these 100,000, only 0.9% completed the course. Of those who submitted
the first problem set, 13% completed the course.

It's definitely possible to get a good education from online courses, but it's
important to realize how difficult it will be to keep yourself on a schedule.
Treat it as a normal university class, prepare yourself, and come up with a
feasible daily/weekly schedule.

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jasode
What kind of courses?

Are they graphics and productivity apps (e.g. Photoshop, Microsoft Office,
etc)?

Or are they programming & databases development stack? (E.g. PHP, Ruby,
Javascript, etc).

If the courses are of the first category (product apps), the videos can be
very helpful. That type of training is heavily task based. In other words,
your eyes follow the instructor's mouse as it moves around the screen and you
"look over his shoulder" to learn how to use software. It's much easier to
learn Photoshop from dynamic video lessons rather than a static book.

However for category of programming, it is more of a mixed bag. You will often
get higher density of information and best practices from books and blogs
rather than videos. That's not to say there aren't any exceptional programming
videos but on balance, the books are higher quality. However, some programming
videos are heavily "task based" such as how to navigate around MS Visual
Studio, or Eclipse, or setting of Apache web server.

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ctb_mg
Speaking in general terms here, because you didn't specify any course
specifics.

I wouldn't base your trade or part of your career on an online course alone.
In order for the knowledge to stick you need to apply and practice it (like
anything else including traditional classroom learning).

However in my experience MOOCs do give you a decent foundation, and likely put
you in a position where you know of concepts being discussed in an area where
your specific trade is being applied.

So my (perhaps unsolicited) advice is to not make the assumption that taking
an online course will inundate you with useful knowledge to then go out in the
industry and practice it. I think it'll give you a good foundation to either
motivate you to gain practical experience or it'll make you aware that this
particular trade is not a good fit for you.

Edit: To directly answer the original question, yes, I have seriously learned
useful things from online courses.

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lumpysnake
I'm on week 2 of Functional Programming Principles in Scala, at Coursera, and
so far it's been a very pleasing experience. Lectures are of very high
quality, and assignements are well built. I can't talk for any other MOOC,
because that's the first one I've been on, but I would definitely recommend it
to anyone.

~~~
brudgers
The Scala course fits a common template for Coursera - by which I mean that a
meaningful fraction of Coursera courses have similar features, but not all
Coursera courses.

That template: A course taught by the person who 'wrote the book', in this
Odersky teaching Scala. Others on Coursera: Ullman/Automata,
Wetherall/Networking, and Sedgewick/Algorithms. The great thing about these
courses is that the instructors know what is important and what isn't and
therefore the courses don't get bogged down stuffing every detail into the
lectures or reflecting every detail in the homework assignments. The big ideas
are the big ideas.

There are also courses taught by mid-career professors - e.g. not fully
tenured. These tend to be pretty good, but there is an undercurrent that the
course assignments must defend their employer's brand by being hard just to be
hard. These also tend to be quality courses, though there seems to be more
variation.

The last group are those taught by newer academics and these vary more widely
in quality. They tend to take a less general approach as there can be the
feeling that 'making a name for oneself' in a publish or perish world is part
of the motivation. If the instructor's interest closely aligns with the course
and the student's interests, then it can be really good. If not, then there's
the 'unenroll' button.

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computer
A specific fun example: I learned the insight that you can make a cryptosystem
(stream cipher) out of a PRNG by using your secret key as PRNG seed, and then
XORing your data with the PRNG output stream. The Coursera cryptography course
was quite good in general.

More in depth: I definitely picked up some concepts in the lectures that I
watched. I thought they were better than normal university lectures, mostly
because you could skip ahead through them. But in general I think that for me,
long assignments are a much more valuable teaching method, and most of the
courses I followed/looked at had much too simple multiple choice fact-based
questions for the practical part.

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nicholas73
I built my first webapp from what I learned in Udacity's CS101 and CS253, and
Codecademy for front end. Supplemented by lots of Google, a quick python
tutorial, and a Java course I took back in college.

[http://sudokuisland.com](http://sudokuisland.com)

More webapps in the works...

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tim333
I did Udacity Compsci 101 and Web Development cs253 (Python based web dev). I
have yet to make a trade of it but they are good, especially cs253 and I hope
to do some professional stuff as a result at some point. The courses are free
if you don't need supervisors helping you.

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NameNickHN
I've learned Android/Java programming from a video course on YouTube. Does
that count?

~~~
jesusmichael
Me too!!

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apostolee
Tbh I haven't yet paid for any online course. I strongly believe that there
are many quality free online courses out there.

But Udemy has great reputation. I strongly recommend you to take a course so
as to be able to form your own opinion after all.

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TotalEclipse
Most definitely. I've only done a couple on Coursera, but I found the
Algorithms courses (1 and 2) by Robert Sedgewick and Kevin Wayne to be pretty
well thought-out and articulate.

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kinj28
i work in learning space for enterprises. though we cater to mobile learning
and continuous learning needs, my observation is moocs work. many OD & L&D
professionals are using moocs for their employees.

