I prefer the MIT OpenCourseware style, where there's no signing up, no trying to get money out of you and you can come in and just take what you want out of a course, much of it graduate level classes where knowledge is dumped for it's own sake, whereas Udacity/Edx/Coursera all seem geared to introductory courses and selling credentials. I typically just want the lecture notes, assignments, and the recommended reading now. I find video lectures too clunky to load up in the bulky UIs of MOOCs, bandwidth problems, and they eat up too much screen space for working along writing out the programs. I appreciate the condensed versions in the notes too since I don't have a lot of time to dedicate an hour to watch a lecture I could read much faster.
Also, I originally learned "real development" (my decade of hacking around C willy nilly modifying programs doesn't really count) from Sussman's "Adventures in Advanced Symbolic Programming" where you read chapters out of SICP and then work on assignments, with mini lectures built into them in just plain text http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-comput...
I agree completely. MOOCs require too much commitment to be frank. I'm currently finishing my EE degree, so I can't really afford to "follow along" given my already full course lod every semester. In addition, I'm more interested in slightly advanced topics covered in a rigorous manner.
MIT OCW is the best solution. The self-paced courses on Coursera and Udacity are OK, but the UI as you say is too clunky, and the content is a bit shallow.
Right now I'm starting to work through Computer Systems Security on OCW [1]. They provide lectures on Youtube, so no need to fiddle around with a third-party app on mobile. They also provide all lecture notes, exams, and labs for learning purposes. The content of the course itself looks extremely interesting as well, and covers a wide array of topics related mainly to RE.
I would not lump edX in with Coursera and Udacity. As noted in Wikipedia: "EdX differs from other MOOC providers, such as Coursera and Udacity, in that it is a nonprofit organization and runs on open-source software."
At first, it seemed to me like Coursera, Udacity and EdX offered similar quality courses. But at this point, I think that, on average, the EdX ones tend to be significantly better. And that difference does seem to me to be related to the fact that EdX is not a for-profit institution trying to extract money from you. Also keep in mind that the EdX systems were largely developed at MIT, and EdX was originally intended as the improved version of OCW.
I'm the Director of Engineering at Udacity and wanted to clarify a couple things: All of our content is available at no cost. It's an important manifestation of one of our most important core values—that education is available to everyone. What we charge for are services. Students enrolled in Nanodegree Programs have access to coaches, a massive worldwide network of code reviewers, certification, job placement and much, much more.
We work hard to help Nanodegree Program students that are looking for jobs in tech get them. For example, one of the best parts of my job is doing mock interviews. Folks on the engineering team volunteer to give a representative tech industry interview to a soon-to-be-graduate and then give them detailed feedback on how they could improve. Hearing back from these students a few weeks later that they got a job at Nest or Google or wherever is one of the most satisfying things I've experienced in my career, and everyone on the team who's done it feels the same.
Finally, we really do think our graduates are ready for jobs. So much so that we've hired two of them as full-time SWEs onto the small engineering team at Udacity. This has worked out incredibly well—these are smart, effective engineers that I'd put up against any traditional school's CS grads. We'll be hiring more of them, and we hear from companies that have hired our graduates that they'll be doing the same.
I'm a little disappointed at the comments here. It's fine to point out flaws and downsides. comparisons to other options like traditional universities, free options. Udacity might even ultimately suck.
But, this is very early in the game and MOOCs are part of the progress, whatever their eventual form or role.
The price of education will ultimately come down to a bunch of things that are still unclear. Can it work at scale without dedicated teachers, dedicated full time pursuit. Can credentialing be solved or bypassed at scale.
The "people want it" is there and the only way to figure things out is to try scaling. That could take decades, culture takes time to evolve.
I don't care about Udacity or anything else, but I'd like to see the concept of better education, cheaper using technology. So, I'm happy to hear them say something like "can be scaled up to teach millions of people technical skills." Try it. If they succeed, great.
I don't think the criticism is against the concept of MOOCs but rather the over-exaggerated claims being made regarding proficiency achieved from the cursory information provided in a given program and career opportunities available after completing said program.
I recently completed 7 Udacity courses in less than 2 months. All of them are from the 'Front End Developer' nanodegree. I am not enrolled in the program, I am just taking the courses for free by watching the lecture notes and doing the short quizzes.
Pros:
1. It provides good breadth of knowledge around what is possible.
2. The style is engaging and the videos are short and well made. I have tried to take Coursera courses before, but always ended up dropping out after the first couple of lectures.
3. It gives you a specific goal; most of the nanodegree courses are geared towards completing a specific project.
4. I was able to quickly get my personal website up and running (I believe in using completely static HTML + CSS, JS when required, and the courses helped me to learn enough to quickly hack together something just using Notepad++).
5. I have plans to enroll for a Nanodegree later. It is quite affordable even for people in developing countries (like me), after accounting for exchange rate fluctuations and cost of living.
Cons:
1. The courses don't go too deep, and you won't become a master unless you are motivated enough to do the work yourself (e.g. Introduction to jQuery - it gives a flavour of what is possible to do with jQuery, but does not go into any depth if you want to be an expert).
2. What you get out of the course if entirely up to your motivation in improving yourself. Completing the courses alone won't be enough to pick up a new skill.
After graduating from a nanodegree program, Udacity now reimburses students half the cost. I'm in the full-stack program and this definitely motivated me to sign-up and motivates me to finish it, too.
You don't need to go that far. Even in europe univs are quite affordable. I attended engineering at Politecnico of Milano and it costed me well south of 3k/year.
It seems it's mostly the US having an issue in education costs.
That's how much it costs in America. But there's nothing stopping them from selling it to South Africans for $20 a month. The marginal cost of an additional student is surely very low.
What I find ridiculous in this article is how bad and social focused Google hiring has become. Google regularly declines to hire people with pHds or decades of real dev experience for developer jobs, yet hires a person after one "full stack developer course?" Reading between the lines we can see how this really works: female: +1, ivy school: +1, young: +1, etc.
On the topic of udacity, I knew from the beginning these claims that they were going to replace traditional education were equally ridiculous. Their courses might get some people jobs they can't handle, and those organizations will subsequently fail at their attempts to develop products. I see stupid stuff all day long. My previous employer hired (IMO) unqualified engineers for (IMO) social reasons. Those people did not commit anything resembling code for months, but of course social politics of the workplace prevented them from being fired or anyone saying anything about their non-work.
Traditional education is traditional. This means everything else has been tried. Everything. MOOC's are not dissimilar to paper based correspondence work that has been around somewhere on the planet for probably hundreds of years. When it gets down to reality, the surviving companies are not going to say, "you watches some videos for a few months, welcome aboard." Those companies that do will slowly die off.
The "full-stack developer" nanodegree mentioned in the article appears on Udacity's list of nanodegrees but, when you click through, it takes you to a page entitled "Full Stack Web Developer Nanodegree".
The curriculum seems decent enough[0] but it's focused on a particular skill set (building and deploying server-rendered web apps and the APIs to support front-end code). It doesn't cover front-end development (e.g. JavaScript or specific frameworks like Angular/React), and so it falls short of 'full stack web', and further short of 'full stack' in the original sense.
The "full stack" starts with electrical signals a thousand miles away and ends with glowing pixels in front of you. Javascript is a teeny tiny sliver of the "stack".
Udacity (and Coursera, edX, MIT OpenCourseware) can and do teach very helpful skills to large groups of self-directed learners. I have benefited from Coursera. I suspect that most who come here fit into that group. One problem is that a large proportion of the population do not have the personality/skills/drive to do this. I would note the Udacity pilot with San Jose State University. They started with a remedial math course, a college algebra course and an introductory statistics course. The pass rate of the stats class was about 50%, the two other courses much lower - 27 and 25% if I remember correctly.
One approach that has worked better is a partnership with a Community College (e.g. Bunker Hill in Massachusetts). Here they use a flipped classroom approach. The students watch online lectures and come to a lab session where they have an instructor to help when they get stuck and are encouraged work in groups. This seems to help many get past the hard parts and complete the work. This approach is obviously more expensive. Very few people work "for free." Self-motivated, disciplined individuals will always do well with systems that focus heavily on independent study. Others will have to pay more to access more personalized support.
Reads like a PR written article. Yes online courses are real, but article almost solely focus on Udacity and its success story.
This is much broader trend (coursera, teamtreehouse etc.). There are also some obstacles (motivation, huge enrollment though very low percent of course completion).
I wish journalist do their research, instead of writing semi-ads.
U's cs101 was a game changer for me. Loved blazing through on demand.
U shot itself in the foot with bad PR when it publicized stats that showed lots of folks starting but not finishing classes. Haters jumped on that. .. But honestly i never saw the big deal. They're like textbooks... you get something out of it but seldom read every page. So what... you're learning!
I read this PR piece as U having learned from that horrible move a few years ago.
I looked at their full stack
program: Apparently
for my startup I've done most or all of that
already! So, right, I've got up my
Web site, with Web pages with HTML and
CSS, and four server side servers. One
of these is just SQL Server. Another
is a Web page session state server I
wrote. And the other two are specialized
to the technical internals of my site.
I did it all from self-teaching. Gee whiz.
"Look, Ma: No courses!"
Also looked at their program
for training data analysts
to "Discover Insights from Data".
"Insights"? For that goal, there
needs to be some caution as in, say,
Statistical Science
2001, Vol. 16, No. 3, 199–231
Statistical Modeling: The Two Cultures
Leo Breiman
Part of their work
is using exploratory data analysis.
Gee, there's a book with that title
by J. Tukey. I have a copy of the
original, that is, the manuscript,
that is, in Tukey's handwriting!
It was okay.
They mention finding "anomalies"
in data. Okay, how about
an anomaly detector that is
both multi-dimensional and
distribution-free with false alarm
rate adjustable in small steps
over a wide range, say, one a
minute, hour, day, week, month,
quarter, and known quite accurately
in advance? I published one of those.
Gee, guys. I also sent 1000+ resumes
and got back zip, zilch, and zero.
Are some people hiring? Do they
really know what the heck they
are looking for? Will they recognize
what they are looking for when they
see it? All maybe not.
[+] [-] pakled_engineer|10 years ago|reply
For example this course on Elliptic Curves http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/mathematics/18-783-elliptic-curve... I decided to take after going through djb IETF working group mailing list posts which are so detailed I wanted to understand the basic math involved. Every post he writes is so thorough it's typically almost a class in itself in modern security analysis http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/cfrg/current/msg07335.h...
Also, I originally learned "real development" (my decade of hacking around C willy nilly modifying programs doesn't really count) from Sussman's "Adventures in Advanced Symbolic Programming" where you read chapters out of SICP and then work on assignments, with mini lectures built into them in just plain text http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-comput...
[+] [-] Cyph0n|10 years ago|reply
MIT OCW is the best solution. The self-paced courses on Coursera and Udacity are OK, but the UI as you say is too clunky, and the content is a bit shallow.
Right now I'm starting to work through Computer Systems Security on OCW [1]. They provide lectures on Youtube, so no need to fiddle around with a third-party app on mobile. They also provide all lecture notes, exams, and labs for learning purposes. The content of the course itself looks extremely interesting as well, and covers a wide array of topics related mainly to RE.
[1]: http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-comput...
[+] [-] jsyedidia|10 years ago|reply
At first, it seemed to me like Coursera, Udacity and EdX offered similar quality courses. But at this point, I think that, on average, the EdX ones tend to be significantly better. And that difference does seem to me to be related to the fact that EdX is not a for-profit institution trying to extract money from you. Also keep in mind that the EdX systems were largely developed at MIT, and EdX was originally intended as the improved version of OCW.
[+] [-] agumonkey|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] artgillespie|10 years ago|reply
We work hard to help Nanodegree Program students that are looking for jobs in tech get them. For example, one of the best parts of my job is doing mock interviews. Folks on the engineering team volunteer to give a representative tech industry interview to a soon-to-be-graduate and then give them detailed feedback on how they could improve. Hearing back from these students a few weeks later that they got a job at Nest or Google or wherever is one of the most satisfying things I've experienced in my career, and everyone on the team who's done it feels the same.
Finally, we really do think our graduates are ready for jobs. So much so that we've hired two of them as full-time SWEs onto the small engineering team at Udacity. This has worked out incredibly well—these are smart, effective engineers that I'd put up against any traditional school's CS grads. We'll be hiring more of them, and we hear from companies that have hired our graduates that they'll be doing the same.
[+] [-] netcan|10 years ago|reply
But, this is very early in the game and MOOCs are part of the progress, whatever their eventual form or role.
The price of education will ultimately come down to a bunch of things that are still unclear. Can it work at scale without dedicated teachers, dedicated full time pursuit. Can credentialing be solved or bypassed at scale.
The "people want it" is there and the only way to figure things out is to try scaling. That could take decades, culture takes time to evolve.
I don't care about Udacity or anything else, but I'd like to see the concept of better education, cheaper using technology. So, I'm happy to hear them say something like "can be scaled up to teach millions of people technical skills." Try it. If they succeed, great.
[+] [-] mtbcoder|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] radmuzom|10 years ago|reply
Pros:
1. It provides good breadth of knowledge around what is possible.
2. The style is engaging and the videos are short and well made. I have tried to take Coursera courses before, but always ended up dropping out after the first couple of lectures.
3. It gives you a specific goal; most of the nanodegree courses are geared towards completing a specific project.
4. I was able to quickly get my personal website up and running (I believe in using completely static HTML + CSS, JS when required, and the courses helped me to learn enough to quickly hack together something just using Notepad++).
5. I have plans to enroll for a Nanodegree later. It is quite affordable even for people in developing countries (like me), after accounting for exchange rate fluctuations and cost of living.
Cons:
1. The courses don't go too deep, and you won't become a master unless you are motivated enough to do the work yourself (e.g. Introduction to jQuery - it gives a flavour of what is possible to do with jQuery, but does not go into any depth if you want to be an expert).
2. What you get out of the course if entirely up to your motivation in improving yourself. Completing the courses alone won't be enough to pick up a new skill.
[+] [-] mattmanser|10 years ago|reply
I used Jekyll for my blog, but ultimately it's just not worth the effort and definitely impractical.
[+] [-] ismail|10 years ago|reply
At $ 200 per a month it is almost as expensive as a top tier university in South Africa.
Udacity Cost per a Month: $200
Cost at a South African University: +- $3000 per year/10 months = $300 per a month.
This excludes any discounts, bursaries etc. Also ignoring the different levels of quality and depth of what you will be learning.
[+] [-] anishkothari|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] LoSboccacc|10 years ago|reply
It seems it's mostly the US having an issue in education costs.
[+] [-] dcre|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Asbostos|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] codeonfire|10 years ago|reply
On the topic of udacity, I knew from the beginning these claims that they were going to replace traditional education were equally ridiculous. Their courses might get some people jobs they can't handle, and those organizations will subsequently fail at their attempts to develop products. I see stupid stuff all day long. My previous employer hired (IMO) unqualified engineers for (IMO) social reasons. Those people did not commit anything resembling code for months, but of course social politics of the workplace prevented them from being fired or anyone saying anything about their non-work.
Traditional education is traditional. This means everything else has been tried. Everything. MOOC's are not dissimilar to paper based correspondence work that has been around somewhere on the planet for probably hundreds of years. When it gets down to reality, the surviving companies are not going to say, "you watches some videos for a few months, welcome aboard." Those companies that do will slowly die off.
[+] [-] rahimnathwani|10 years ago|reply
The curriculum seems decent enough[0] but it's focused on a particular skill set (building and deploying server-rendered web apps and the APIs to support front-end code). It doesn't cover front-end development (e.g. JavaScript or specific frameworks like Angular/React), and so it falls short of 'full stack web', and further short of 'full stack' in the original sense.
[0] https://www.udacity.com/course/full-stack-web-developer-nano...
[+] [-] gaius|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] johnminter|10 years ago|reply
One approach that has worked better is a partnership with a Community College (e.g. Bunker Hill in Massachusetts). Here they use a flipped classroom approach. The students watch online lectures and come to a lab session where they have an instructor to help when they get stuck and are encouraged work in groups. This seems to help many get past the hard parts and complete the work. This approach is obviously more expensive. Very few people work "for free." Self-motivated, disciplined individuals will always do well with systems that focus heavily on independent study. Others will have to pay more to access more personalized support.
[+] [-] jakozaur|10 years ago|reply
This is much broader trend (coursera, teamtreehouse etc.). There are also some obstacles (motivation, huge enrollment though very low percent of course completion).
I wish journalist do their research, instead of writing semi-ads.
[+] [-] coldcode|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] LoSboccacc|10 years ago|reply
Not everyone can be a productive programmer, independently from what they want, how hard they try or how they are teached
[+] [-] gaius|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pekk|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rtz12|10 years ago|reply
I would say that too if I could charge everyone of them $200 every month.
[+] [-] redwood|10 years ago|reply
U shot itself in the foot with bad PR when it publicized stats that showed lots of folks starting but not finishing classes. Haters jumped on that. .. But honestly i never saw the big deal. They're like textbooks... you get something out of it but seldom read every page. So what... you're learning!
I read this PR piece as U having learned from that horrible move a few years ago.
[+] [-] SQL2219|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ThomPete|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rorykoehler|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] graycat|10 years ago|reply
I did it all from self-teaching. Gee whiz.
"Look, Ma: No courses!"
Also looked at their program for training data analysts to "Discover Insights from Data".
"Insights"? For that goal, there needs to be some caution as in, say,
as athttp://projecteuclid.org/DPubS/Repository/1.0/Disseminate?vi...
Part of their work is using exploratory data analysis. Gee, there's a book with that title by J. Tukey. I have a copy of the original, that is, the manuscript, that is, in Tukey's handwriting! It was okay.
They mention finding "anomalies" in data. Okay, how about an anomaly detector that is both multi-dimensional and distribution-free with false alarm rate adjustable in small steps over a wide range, say, one a minute, hour, day, week, month, quarter, and known quite accurately in advance? I published one of those.
Gee, guys. I also sent 1000+ resumes and got back zip, zilch, and zero.
Are some people hiring? Do they really know what the heck they are looking for? Will they recognize what they are looking for when they see it? All maybe not.