Hey guys, I'm the creator of the site. Thanks for posting it Joel!
I've been trying to delicately balance the line between too many links versus not enough links. I created this site in the first place because I had seen tons of these "best places to learn online" compilations, but all of them had about 200 links. Way too many to actually be useful.
So I sought out to create something where there were only a few websites per category, but you could trust that they were all the best the web has to offer. As you can see from some of the comments on here, it's a fine line between too many and too few. I keep finding new ones that I think are too good not to include.
I've been thinking lately about how I can make this site more useful to my users. It seems like most people come once or twice, see a link they like and don't come back until the next time they want to learn something. Although you could argue that's basically what the site is designed to do, I would like to see more repeat users. Any ideas? I have a few in mind already, but I wanted to see what the general consensus was.
You could pull together different courses and show how they complement each other to create tracts.
Sure, you can just organize them and leave them as they are right now and let people pick what they want, but if you vetted the courses and had suggested tracts to send people through, that could be pretty valuable.
I really like the idea of the site, and the mission to limit the number of things on it. Too many options, and I just get choice paralysis.
However, to be frank, I don't know who you are, so why should I trust your recommendations? I wouldn't mind if you were the only person to decide what gets posted, but I would like to see content from users, primarily tags, votes, and comments. This might also increase user engagement.
You could also make it "social" if you wanted. Allow users to publicly commit to doing a certain tutorial X hours per day/week, and you track that from when they click through your site to the tutorial site, and then they check back in when they're done. Or it could be complete honor system. I wouldn't worry too much about people lying, because really, they'd just be hurting themselves.
Right now you have short descriptions about the sites in the alt text. Consider adding an expandable section for each link that has: the short description from the alt text, maybe a "for people who like..." (or "for people who don't like...") pointer for users to understand the philosophy of a resource.
I think the problem with users coming once or twice is that taking the time to understand and try a resource is a lot of work. With only the bare links, they have no way to use their previous experience to judge the other resources without another significant investment.
You could also ask users to vote "works for me" and "doesn't work for me" and then display those votes when a user registers theirs. You could also use those votes to track the utility of each link to users.
This is just a random idea, but how about a scheduler? A lot of times when I am self-educating, I find myself hitting a search engine or Wikipedia and getting sidetracked indefinitely. Soon I stumble across another amazing site and any hope of focus is lost.
Fitting in with the title of your site ("No Excuse List"), allowing a user to create a list of to-dos on a per site basis with due dates, could be pretty cool. Although I am hesitant of yet another to-do list manager...
Great site, I think I had seen it before (in Reddit?). I like it just the way it is, no nonsense carefully curated list of things to learn online.
I feel weary of changing any of this, but if you want users to come back a good feature would be listing the starting dates for upcoming courses. Coursera and Udacity courses have specific launch dates, you can use this information for a more "what do I want to learn next week" experience.
Here's a link to an excellent music, (primarily guitar) learning class that does not get much attention in the North America: http://www.guitarmasterclass.net/. Consider adding this to you list. I appreciate the effort at building a website of curated links by the way.
This is great, and I like the "no excuse" angle, but the list is a little overwhelming. The problem of self-learning today is not to find ressources, it's to find a good one and stick to it until you mastered the subject. If there are several good ones, just pick one of them.
On this subject, see The Paradox of choice[1] and Buridan's donkey[2].
Sidenote: For me, "Windows 7, OneNote + more for students" and Dreamspark go to the same link.
Agreed. What I find is usually missing from a lot of lists of "learning" online is a time-proven track through a subject to take you from beginner to expert.
I think the problem with self learning is making the information digestable enough and regular gratification to the user about the things they've just learned (challenges that gradually increase in difficulty).
Highlight which of the sites offer that (with icons?) and it would help user pick the right sites based on their patience level e.g..
I thought it could have actually been built out a bit more. If they created a few more categories (and sub-categories), they could really have something very cool on their hands.
I agree with you on 'picking one' and sticking to it. Maybe I should highlight one source for each that I strongly recommend or something?
Also, thanks for the heads up about the Dreamspark link. Looks like windows recently redirected it to the same site. You used to be able to download Windows 7 and other resources for free as a student...
I would be curious to know what you think of our self learning site called LearningJar.com, where we are helping people figure out the best resources to learn skills and follow their progress.
As someone who took up this hobby a couple years ago, I can attest that the collection of cooking links is awful. There's a difference between learning how to cook and a recipe, and these sites aren't even good at either.
I've heard good things about chefhangout.com and rouxbe.com. And sadly most of the best cooking information still exists in printed books. Ruhlman's 20 is a great place to start.
I, too, have been really disappointed with cooking education online. This is an area ripe for a good startup (that someone else can do, I have my hands full). :)
Some ideas:
- Leverage Google Hangout for some interactive classes
- Use gamification to help users learn some of the more boring fundamentals (basic cooking terms, substitution guidelines, units and measurements, basic baking chemistry guidelines, etc.)
- A better instruction format geared toward using your iPad or other tablet propped up in the kitchen. For example, make sure the user can navigate with the nub of a knuckle or some other clumsy way, so they don't have to touch their iPad with fingers that just got through tenderizing raw chicken.
- That instruction format should probably incorporate a hybrid text-audio-video approach. And by that I don't mean a blog post with an embedded video at the top. I mean a way to constantly review just that part of the video that talks about what you're doing.
- Start with videos about things that are obvious but are useful to see. For example, what EXACTLY should olive oil look and smell like before you add the food to it? On a typical gas stove or electric range, where approximately should the knob be? I'm starting to get nervous about this pan-fry step. Are you sure I shouldn't go ahead and flip the chicken? I think I'm burning it! Those kind of things are currently best learned with the assistance of a REAL cook alongside you in the kitchen. He or she can say "don't you DARE touch that portobello; it's SO not done!" There needs to be a way for the more moment-by-moment learning experiences to be available online.
TL;DR - thinking of doing a cooking startup? PLEASE don't give us another "recipes with an embedded video" site. Please.
When I started cooking, I was intimidated by long recipes and never knowing what substitutions or omissions I could make.
This ebook really turned me on, because of its "minimal cooking approach". By stripping recipes down to their bare essentials, this book made cooking approachable. I began to understand the fundamentals, and that allowed me to feel free to experiment.
However, at this point all of my knowledge is ad-hoc. I wouldn't mind recommendations or pointers on how to improve my skill, and I agree that it's not clear where to go for this information.
Hey, thanks for the link. I've looked pretty hard for sites that teach cooking and they're pretty hard to come by! The cooking for engineers has been the best one that I've seen. Its surprising that there's not better resources. I didn't want to have to start linking to youtube channels...
The book I'm currently going through (after a year of using the techniques I learned as a kid to successfully follow random recipes) is Cooking for Geeks (http://cookingforgeeks.com). None of its advice is obviously wrong so far, and it's not telling me that I need every single kitchen gadget, which I like. But of course, I don't really know enough to know if it's wrong.
Especially the desserts/baking section by Rudolph van Veen is great. He covers many classics, like creme caramel, tarte tatin, baklava, omelette siberienne, etc. He also explains the basic techniques well, like beating egg white with molten sugar to get a sturdy cream.
There's an amazing textbook titled "On Cooking" which is the single most influential resource I've used for learning how to seriously cook. From food safety to knife skills, butchering to baking, it covers everything. I would highly recommend picking up a copy if you're interested in or already have a passion for cooking.
rouxbe.com is very, very good. I went through all of their videos over the course of a week or so a couple years back, and the pacing, depth, and quality of instruction are extremely impressive. I would recommend it to anyone.
If you're just starting out with cooking as I was a few years ago, http://startcooking.com/ is a great site. Very basic information but explained concisely.
agree with rouxbe.com. their how-to videos/classes are very well put-together and the community of users incredibly active, insightful and participative.
Memrise (under the languages section) is pretty amazing. Or, at least seems amazing from 15 minutes of going through the Chinese stuff. I hate memorizing things, but the interface and visual cues for learning characters, and way they track your progress actually makes the process enjoyable for me.
So far, at least.
As with all these tools, you could teach yourself this stuff before, it'd just require more work and discipline for you to find the necessary books and make your own teaching plan. The advantage of these services is that they lower the friction to learn. Hopefully they reduce the friction enough so that there is a much higher ratio of enjoyment/reward to effort, making you more likely to stick with it. But you still have to stick with it to learn anything.
I'm doing some Memrise now and the best thing about it is they seem to have gamified it. The plantlings that grow really do encourage me to keep, well, playing.
I'm a big fan of Memrise. I think one of the best features is that it uses the community to suggest ways of remembering a word. People remember things differently, so if you have to see a picture of a baby crying with his mouth open to remember that the word 口 means mouth, then so be it.
I'm hoping duolingo comes out with their Chinese track soon. That'll be very interesting.
I'm not a huge fan of Memrise, especially for Chinese. At least when I checked it, there was way too much of an initial emphasis on characters and it also suggested a widely-believed but incorrect idea that characters = words. I say this as someone who has spent most his adult life in the Chinese speaking world, gone through the struggle of learning myself and met hundreds of other foreigners doing the same.
The best option for learning Mandarin would be Popup Chinese. If you exhaust their materials or find yourself wanting a southern accent, go on to ChinesePod. Once you can already speak and read some, go to Skritter if you want to learn how to write. If I had had these three resources 10 years ago, it would have been a much, much easier path.
Duolingo is attempting to do the same "gameification" of language learning that Memrise is doing. They're both fairly successful, but I find that neither of them are as "sticky" as a really good game. It's too easy to put it down.
This is a nice comprehensive list, but I think sites that focus on aggregation need to step it up beyond a simple text-listing. There needs to be some other metric/gauge beyond just the title of the course. It could even be as simple as icon(s) for whether the resource is a text-based site, available as an e-book, or taught mostly through videos. Or: a complexity level (beginner/intermediate/expert)...Or hell, just a 15 word summary of why you included the link.
It's tough to design good taxonomies of course, but resources like this would greatly benefit from anything that would keep someone from having to click-through each link to discover the usefulness of each resource.
Not trying to sound ungrateful, but a lot of these link-sites come up on HN (there are several based on just programming books, for instance)...It'd be great to see such things evolve into something more.
Some good links, but something like this really needs search and filtering, and some sort of category overview - as it is, on most monitors you need to scroll to even see all the main categories...
The description of the arXiv is a little off, it says "Cornell's library of published academic research papers", while really the arXiv is mainly for preprints, i.e., papers that have not yet been published. It is true, however, that in some fields it is common for journals to let you keep a (non-final) version of your paper on the arXiv.
From those that have taken them, which of the coursera/udacity/EdX courses are really really good? I go to the sites, get excited and register for everything but I know focus would mean I'd stick with them.
I think he didn't include it because there is a (monthly) fee on this one.
But some courses are free and I agree, I definitely endorse this one to be on the lilst. I am one of those learn-by-doing people and codeschool is just great. Like codecademy on steroids.
[+] [-] lix2333|13 years ago|reply
I've been trying to delicately balance the line between too many links versus not enough links. I created this site in the first place because I had seen tons of these "best places to learn online" compilations, but all of them had about 200 links. Way too many to actually be useful.
So I sought out to create something where there were only a few websites per category, but you could trust that they were all the best the web has to offer. As you can see from some of the comments on here, it's a fine line between too many and too few. I keep finding new ones that I think are too good not to include.
I've been thinking lately about how I can make this site more useful to my users. It seems like most people come once or twice, see a link they like and don't come back until the next time they want to learn something. Although you could argue that's basically what the site is designed to do, I would like to see more repeat users. Any ideas? I have a few in mind already, but I wanted to see what the general consensus was.
[+] [-] joelrunyon|13 years ago|reply
Sure, you can just organize them and leave them as they are right now and let people pick what they want, but if you vetted the courses and had suggested tracts to send people through, that could be pretty valuable.
[+] [-] natep|13 years ago|reply
However, to be frank, I don't know who you are, so why should I trust your recommendations? I wouldn't mind if you were the only person to decide what gets posted, but I would like to see content from users, primarily tags, votes, and comments. This might also increase user engagement.
You could also make it "social" if you wanted. Allow users to publicly commit to doing a certain tutorial X hours per day/week, and you track that from when they click through your site to the tutorial site, and then they check back in when they're done. Or it could be complete honor system. I wouldn't worry too much about people lying, because really, they'd just be hurting themselves.
[+] [-] aeturnum|13 years ago|reply
I think the problem with users coming once or twice is that taking the time to understand and try a resource is a lot of work. With only the bare links, they have no way to use their previous experience to judge the other resources without another significant investment.
You could also ask users to vote "works for me" and "doesn't work for me" and then display those votes when a user registers theirs. You could also use those votes to track the utility of each link to users.
[+] [-] pirateking|13 years ago|reply
Fitting in with the title of your site ("No Excuse List"), allowing a user to create a list of to-dos on a per site basis with due dates, could be pretty cool. Although I am hesitant of yet another to-do list manager...
[+] [-] duopixel|13 years ago|reply
I feel weary of changing any of this, but if you want users to come back a good feature would be listing the starting dates for upcoming courses. Coursera and Udacity courses have specific launch dates, you can use this information for a more "what do I want to learn next week" experience.
[+] [-] zubairshams|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spicyj|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] saint-loup|13 years ago|reply
Sidenote: For me, "Windows 7, OneNote + more for students" and Dreamspark go to the same link.
[1] http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6127548813950043200
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buridan%27s_ass
[+] [-] countessa|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jschuur|13 years ago|reply
Highlight which of the sites offer that (with icons?) and it would help user pick the right sites based on their patience level e.g..
[+] [-] joelrunyon|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lix2333|13 years ago|reply
Also, thanks for the heads up about the Dreamspark link. Looks like windows recently redirected it to the same site. You used to be able to download Windows 7 and other resources for free as a student...
[+] [-] americandesi333|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aoprisan|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mattmaroon|13 years ago|reply
I've heard good things about chefhangout.com and rouxbe.com. And sadly most of the best cooking information still exists in printed books. Ruhlman's 20 is a great place to start.
[+] [-] breckinloggins|13 years ago|reply
Some ideas:
- Leverage Google Hangout for some interactive classes
- Use gamification to help users learn some of the more boring fundamentals (basic cooking terms, substitution guidelines, units and measurements, basic baking chemistry guidelines, etc.)
- A better instruction format geared toward using your iPad or other tablet propped up in the kitchen. For example, make sure the user can navigate with the nub of a knuckle or some other clumsy way, so they don't have to touch their iPad with fingers that just got through tenderizing raw chicken.
- That instruction format should probably incorporate a hybrid text-audio-video approach. And by that I don't mean a blog post with an embedded video at the top. I mean a way to constantly review just that part of the video that talks about what you're doing.
- Start with videos about things that are obvious but are useful to see. For example, what EXACTLY should olive oil look and smell like before you add the food to it? On a typical gas stove or electric range, where approximately should the knob be? I'm starting to get nervous about this pan-fry step. Are you sure I shouldn't go ahead and flip the chicken? I think I'm burning it! Those kind of things are currently best learned with the assistance of a REAL cook alongside you in the kitchen. He or she can say "don't you DARE touch that portobello; it's SO not done!" There needs to be a way for the more moment-by-moment learning experiences to be available online.
TL;DR - thinking of doing a cooking startup? PLEASE don't give us another "recipes with an embedded video" site. Please.
[+] [-] bravura|13 years ago|reply
http://thestonesoup.com/blog/2010/06/a-free-e-cookbook/
When I started cooking, I was intimidated by long recipes and never knowing what substitutions or omissions I could make.
This ebook really turned me on, because of its "minimal cooking approach". By stripping recipes down to their bare essentials, this book made cooking approachable. I began to understand the fundamentals, and that allowed me to feel free to experiment.
However, at this point all of my knowledge is ad-hoc. I wouldn't mind recommendations or pointers on how to improve my skill, and I agree that it's not clear where to go for this information.
[+] [-] lix2333|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] natep|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jules|13 years ago|reply
Especially the desserts/baking section by Rudolph van Veen is great. He covers many classics, like creme caramel, tarte tatin, baklava, omelette siberienne, etc. He also explains the basic techniques well, like beating egg white with molten sugar to get a sturdy cream.
[+] [-] kingnothing|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] burke|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Spoom|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] edemay|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Dove|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] coldarchon|13 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] rauljara|13 years ago|reply
So far, at least.
As with all these tools, you could teach yourself this stuff before, it'd just require more work and discipline for you to find the necessary books and make your own teaching plan. The advantage of these services is that they lower the friction to learn. Hopefully they reduce the friction enough so that there is a much higher ratio of enjoyment/reward to effort, making you more likely to stick with it. But you still have to stick with it to learn anything.
Here's hoping I will.
[+] [-] rickdale|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Lockyy|13 years ago|reply
Excellent idea.
[+] [-] lix2333|13 years ago|reply
I'm hoping duolingo comes out with their Chinese track soon. That'll be very interesting.
[+] [-] xiaoma|13 years ago|reply
The best option for learning Mandarin would be Popup Chinese. If you exhaust their materials or find yourself wanting a southern accent, go on to ChinesePod. Once you can already speak and read some, go to Skritter if you want to learn how to write. If I had had these three resources 10 years ago, it would have been a much, much easier path.
[+] [-] officemonkey|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danso|13 years ago|reply
It's tough to design good taxonomies of course, but resources like this would greatly benefit from anything that would keep someone from having to click-through each link to discover the usefulness of each resource.
Not trying to sound ungrateful, but a lot of these link-sites come up on HN (there are several based on just programming books, for instance)...It'd be great to see such things evolve into something more.
[+] [-] unreal37|13 years ago|reply
http://www.openculture.com/freeonlinecourses
http://www.class-central.com/
[+] [-] johnbenwoo|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] m_ke|13 years ago|reply
Video Lectures: https://www.coursera.org http://www.udacity.com http://www.academicearth.org/ http://www.learnerstv.com http://lecturefox.com http://thecodeplayer.com http://www.cosmolearning.com http://www.class-central.com http://videolectures.net
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