[sharadov]

Both have garbage content at this point - Coursera was great when they launched, top quality material and university-level instruction. Now it's just bottom of the barrel scraps.

YT has tons of quality instruction - hell nowadays I just ask an LLM to make me a course for whatever I wanna learn.

[robotresearcher]

I tried that out in my field of expertise, to calibrate my expectations. ChatGPT invented multiple references to non-existent but plausibly-titled papers written by me.

I think of that when asking questions about areas I don’t know.

That was about 18mo ago, so maybe this kind of hallucination is under control these days.

[wat10000]

LLMs are good for tasks where you can verify the result. And you must verify the result unless you're just using it for entertainment.

[wahnfrieden]

I would use an agent (Codex) for this task: use the Pro model in ChatGPT for deep research and to assemble the information and citations, then have Codex systematically go through the citations with a task list to web search and verify or correct each. Codex can be used like a test suite.

[SoftTalker]

Turns out Gell-Mann amnesia applies to LLMs too.

[vunderba]

My biggest issue with Udemy courses is that it's not easy to vet the instructor. User ratings are unreliable since beginners aren't really in a position to evaluate a teacher's expertise.

If Udemy's pitch were “Learn X as Taught by Notable People in the Field,” I would have signed up in a heartbeat.

- 3D Graphics taught by Michael Abrash

- Card Manipulation taught by Jeff McBride

- Pianistic Ergonomics taught by Edna Golandsky

[jonathanlb]

> If Udemy's pitch were “Learn X as Taught by Notable People in the Field,”

MasterClass already is like this, but the content doesn't go as deep as it could to really teach learners.

[raincole]

Notable people tend to teach on their own sites, or at least more specialized sites rather than generic sites like Udemy. Udemy would need to pay them instead.

[Andrex]

It's not hard to look at each profile, most will proudly shout their top credentials as visibly and often as possible. "1M Subscribers on YouTube!" vs. "I worked in this industry for 10 years" is a pretty easy call. How much of this process should be spoonfed? Active engagement is required at some point.

Udemy functions as open market with the associated pros and cons.

[bigstrat2003]

> nowadays I just ask an LLM to make me a course for whatever I wanna learn.

That is an excellent way to trick yourself into thinking that you learned, when really you got fed bad information. LLMs are nowhere near reliable enough to use for this topic and probably never will be.

[ravenstine]

I guess it depends on what you ask an LLM to teach you. For certain subjects, I've found them to be a pain in the ass to get right.

For instance, I was hoping that I could use GPT to help me learn to fly a B737-800. This is actually less challenging than people think... if you just want to get in the air and skip all proper procedure and safety checks! If you want to fly a commercial plane like a real pilot, there is a ton of procedure and instruments to understand. There is actually quite a bit of material on this available online via flight crew operations manuals, as well as an old (but still relevant) manual straight from Boeing. So why rely on GPT? It's a bit hard to explain without rambling, but those manuals are designed for pilots with a lot of prior knowledge, not some goofball with X-Plane and a joystick. It would be nice to distill that information down for someone who just wants an idiot's guide to preflight procedure, setting the flight computer, taxiing, taking off, and performing an ILS landing.

Sadly, it turned out I really had to hold the LLM's hand along the way, even when I provided it two PDFs of everything it needed to know, because it would skip many steps and get them out of order, or not be able to correctly specify where a particular instrument or switch was located. It was almost a waste of time, and I actually still have more to do because it's that inefficient.

That said, I still think LLMs can be unreasonably good for learning about very specific subjects so long as you don't blindly believe it. I kinda hate how I have to say that, but I see people all the time believing anything Grok says. :facepalm: GPT has been a big help in learning things about finance, chemistry, and electronics. Not sure I would assume it could create a full blown course, but who knows. I bet it'd be pretty solid at coming up with exam questions.

[johanyc]

Yeah. And the a lot of coursera courses offered by universities are dumbed down. I much prefer going to Youtube and watch open courses there.

[DougN7]

Considering hallucinations, that seems risky. How do you double check what you were taught?

[ASalazarMX]

Don't ask them to teach you, ask them to make a self-study syllabus/roadmap with online references. It's likely that it ingested the work of others in exactly this scenario, so it shouldn't confabulate as easily.

[moralestapia]

The same way you double check with any other method you prefer? Duh.

LLMs are vastly superior to compile and spread knowledge than any other thing preceding them.

[boltzmann_]

Hallucinations has made huge progress over last 3 years

[raincole]

I don't know much about Coursera, but Udemy has always been quite bad since I remember.

Most drawing/painting courses are taught from people who are juniors at best. The quality is laughable compared to what you can get for free from Marco Bucci/Sinix/Proko channels. And honestly, even those high-quality videos won't teach you how to draw anyway.

That being said, I didn't realize how bad Udemy art courses were when I got started. I think that's a life lesson for me especially in the era of LLM.