
Ask HN: Is there a MOOC provider that deals in more advanced topics? - teapot01
I enjoy learning new things and expanding my area of expertise outside of the work that I do, usually I try to do this through reading, conference talks, and online courses.<p>Lately though, I find that a lot of the MOOC courses from coursera, et al. tend to be written for complete beginners and provide very lightweight courses. Because of this I tend to disengage from the course and not complete it.<p>Are there any MOOCs that are more suited for continuing professional development?<p>A side question is how can these courses ever hope to replace university level training?
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hawkweed
In depth technical books, like for example[1], are very rare these days.
Competent people are busy building systems, frameworks and making money. Some
of these guys are talking on various conferences, but IMO just to present
themselves to various companies. To put it simply they are mostly in a
business of selling their time.

Systematic approach of learning particular topic through the books is
deprecated these days. One of the ways to expand knowledge would be building
stuff. If you are into distributed systems, implement something small and
build upon that (i.e. implement raft[2] or build distributed rate limiter).
There will be many problems and I'm sure you will learn a lot along the way.

[1] "Design of Unix Operating System by Maurice Bach" [2]
[https://raft.github.io/](https://raft.github.io/)

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ejanus
>Systematic approach of learning particular topic through the books is
deprecated these days.

Are we getting smart or following trends ?

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hawkweed
Not sure what's your question to be honest, could you please provide more
context?

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csnewb
IMO once you're past the beginner stage of learning a technical topic (which
is what most MOOCs provide), you have to either develop side projects or work
on open source projects to learn more advanced concepts.

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ejanus
It is not easy to achieve that . I joined an open source project but was
overwhelmed because I was not well prepped . I have to read a lot of RFCs ,
source codes , and countless technical papers and articles. It is indeed
demanding , and crazy . Maybe I would learn something great at the end.

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solomatov
SCPD: [http://scpd.stanford.edu/home](http://scpd.stanford.edu/home) and
Harvard Extension School: [https://www.extension.harvard.edu/course-
catalog/courses](https://www.extension.harvard.edu/course-catalog/courses)

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5_minutes
I would recommend normal online trainings (which you can do without pressure),
getting some good books and have the discipline to stick with it.

MOOCs are trendy but hard to keep up with if anything uncertain popups up in
your life, or you can't keep up because you don't have the skills yet etc.

MOOCs in it's current form are not particularly interesting unless, or even
sustainable for the large audience it's been appealing to --- unless you're a
student or someone with plenty of time.

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pravula
_A side question is how can these courses ever hope to replace university
level training?_ \- [https://www.edx.org/](https://www.edx.org/) Some top tier
univs there offering courses and degrees.

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teapot01
I know the top tier Universities are offering degrees, but it feels like the
content of those courses is not nearly as deep as the content I was taught at
an admittedly lower grade university.

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cvguy
Udemy? It may not be a MOOC though but what's in a name if it serves the
purpose... Also, O'Reilly Media is good. The only (major) downside is that
they are not free (but largely affordable, methinks).

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orsenthil
Yeah, those are called textbooks and you start by solving the problems given
in each lesson. You could start with the algorithms book written by the author
named Knuth. I 've heard the problems are really challenging.

