This was a fantastic course, and I do hope they follow it up with an advanced one. I especially enjoyed how one submitted homework attempts with sbt, and how their unit tests encouraged one to repeatedly submit until a perfect score was obtained. I feel that I learned a lot.
I get the impression that this course lowered the threshold to exploring the functional paradigm for a lot of students who were aware of it but never took the time to do it on their own. Ten thousand new programmers in one language is no small achievement.
Who here wouldn't jump at the chance to join a MOOC on Haskell taught by Simpon Peyton Jones? Or Rich Hickey teaching Clojure?
I hope to see more learning resources like this in the future.
I'm in the middle of taking the course, and while I enjoy it, I wish the prerequisites mentioned the heavy emphasis on math. I don't have a CS degree, nor do I have a background in advanced maths, so I find myself struggling with the assignments and in-class exercises.
I don't want to take anything away from the quality of the teaching (which was quite high), but having completed a few courses at Coursera, I think a big reason the completion rate was so high was that it was simply nowhere near as much work as the other programming courses I have taken.
I'm not sure this is a bad thing at all. I loved the course, myself, and would jump at a chance to take the next one in the sequence. Given the web format, I think shorter, easier to master units of learning are probably the way to go, and this course's high completion rate supports that.
But when comparing it to other course's completion rates, you need to keep in mind that there simply wasn't that much to complete.
I think this course was excellent. My main problem with most tutorials - especially on functional programming - is that I was totally unable to understand how one solves practical common tasks in language like Scala. The course helped me a lot with that. While I am still not a competent Scala programmer, I got a reasonable understanding how Scala works and how one should approach doing things in Scala.
[+] [-] pohl|13 years ago|reply
I get the impression that this course lowered the threshold to exploring the functional paradigm for a lot of students who were aware of it but never took the time to do it on their own. Ten thousand new programmers in one language is no small achievement.
Who here wouldn't jump at the chance to join a MOOC on Haskell taught by Simpon Peyton Jones? Or Rich Hickey teaching Clojure?
I hope to see more learning resources like this in the future.
[+] [-] bmj|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rauljara|13 years ago|reply
I'm not sure this is a bad thing at all. I loved the course, myself, and would jump at a chance to take the next one in the sequence. Given the web format, I think shorter, easier to master units of learning are probably the way to go, and this course's high completion rate supports that.
But when comparing it to other course's completion rates, you need to keep in mind that there simply wasn't that much to complete.
[+] [-] pohl|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smsm42|13 years ago|reply