12 new universities join Coursera

http://blog.coursera.org/post/27394575240/12-new-universities-join-coursera

by vibrunazo • 14 years ago

207 100 14 years ago

blog.coursera.org

waterlesscloud4• 14 years ago

I'm going to be in classes for the rest of my life. Literally. I love it.

tomrod2• 14 years ago

Me too! :D

HarrietJones• 14 years ago

Great.

I took a Coursera course last month, and despite a couple of weirdnesses, it was a really enjoyable experience. I don't really get Udacity, but I'm definitely going to take a couple more of these courses.

It also appears as though they're starting to figure out how to mark essays, etc without involving huge numbers of lecturers. It's an exciting time for eduction.

mapleoin• 14 years ago

I'm curious to know how are they marking essays. Can you say more about it? Links are fine, too.

EDIT: Oh, nevermind, I've found it. It seems that student grade each other's essays - one student grades three other students.

Look here, under Peer Evaluation: http://spark-public.s3.amazonaws.com/fantasysf/Documents/Wor...

waterlesscloud4• 14 years ago

I'm signed up for that particular class and I've been wondering how it was going to go.

The workload looks reasonably significant, which I'm happy about. I'm a little skeptical of peer grading of essays, but it's something they've got to figure out for the future.

Every class I've done so far has had a tiny minority of forum whining about grades. I'm expecting it to be notably higher in this class, but we'll see how it goes...

plinkplonk• 14 years ago

Who on HN is taking one or more of these courses?

I signed on for Daphne Koller's Probabilistic Graphical Models and Geoff Hinton's Neural Networks courses. PGM is supposed to be really tough. I am planning to take a couple of months off from work.

This new world, where you can learn for free from the experts, is a dream come true.

I am thinking of blogging my progress (or lack of it, as the case maybe!)

muellerwolfram• 14 years ago

I signed up for 'Software Engineering for SaaS' and going to take more programming courses when i have more time... its really amazing, the courses are so much butter than at my university...

waterlesscloud4• 14 years ago

"the courses are so much butter than at my university"

That's the real challenge to all the middle-of-the-road schools out there. Now they can be directly compared to the best.

zumda• 14 years ago

I took the Machine Learning course by Andrew Ng some time ago. And it was a really great experience.

The lessons are interesting, and I really like their concept of quizzes in the middle of the lessons. They just show the question on the video, he explains it, and they stop the video and you can choose which one is right, or type in the number.

The homework is also well done and enhances the knowledge from the course. I had a lot of fun doing the lectures each and every week. You probably want to put aside a set day and time when you will do it, though, or else it is easy to do other things and "do the lectures later".

If they continue like this, there is soon no reason to go to a university anymore. :) (which is a catch-22 since the lecturers are payed by universities...)

GlenAnderson4• 14 years ago

I've been watching the lectures for the same course. Having them split into short self-contained videos (~5-15mins) has made it very easy to fit in around university and a toddler.

For example, whenever I do the washing up I put my tablet on the windowsill and watch a video. I've also been watching them instead of browsing the web as a more structured break when studying. The fixed length of a video makes it much easier to be disciplined with the length of my breaks. The subject matter is different enough and presented in such a digestible way that it really is a good break.

buddhika• 14 years ago

Prof. Ng's ML course was a real eye opener. It wasn't hard but was very practical. Then when you need more theoretical background you can watch recordings of his stanford ML class.

tomp6• 14 years ago

I didn't like the homeworks on the ML course. The programming exercises were child's play for someone who already knows how to program, you just had to translate math equations to code. I hardly learned anything by doing them.

seiji2• 14 years ago

can learn for free from the experts, is a dream come true.

I'm not sure that's what they do though. Learning "from the experts" means they are there to help you, understand where you're coming from, and correct you along the way. Just watching a video of someone with recorded slides is something we could have done 20 years ago.

I was excited about the PGM class, but my interest dropped after the first few videos (100% comic sans slides, poor video quality, poor audio quality).

Just because you are an expert in some field has zero bearing on your ability to teach or convey information. I'm not sure a "let's imitate college lecture formats" site founded by smart people understands that. They fall into the trap of "smart people can do EVERYTHING!" There are a lot of very smart people who have negative presentation skills. There are a lot of very smart people who have excellent presentation skills too.

Solution: have the smart people write the script, but have people excited about presenting show it to the world.

GlenAnderson4• 14 years ago

udacity has gone too far the other way for me. It seems very slick but I switched off after a couple of minutes because I felt like I was watching a kids tv show.

tomp6• 14 years ago

I'm smart, and I prefer it that way. Actually, I wish it was even more concentrated, more expertise, less "teaching".

Ultimately, I believe, there will have to be different (types of) lectures for different people, and different speeds.

The UI, however, could be improved.

math• 14 years ago

I watched most of Daphne's videos and had the opposite reaction - I was blown away at how good they were. I felt as though I had a world class expert standing there in front of me explaining things very clearly. I particularly enjoyed that I never felt like things were being "dumbed down". I didn't notice the comic sans - actually maybe I did subconsciously and maybe this even improved the impression on me "how quaint - someone who is so into their work they don't even realize people make fun of you for using that font". There were video and audio issues, but to me they were secondary.

pirateking• 14 years ago

I am taking the Introduction to Cryptography course at a leisurely pace right now. Experience has been awesome so far, and am definitely looking forward to taking more courses on the site.

After aimlessly reading HN and blogs for so long, having a solid, structured course feels so... good. I need to mentally prepare myself for this very real thing called "learning" once again!

FrojoS4• 14 years ago

Great! I've signed up for "Computing for Data Analysis".

Personally, the old saying

Not only is a book the better teacher, it also has more character.

holds mostly true for me. Most classes, that I remember to be superior to the experience of a good book, were either because there simply wasn't a good book, or the teacher was extremely charismatic, or both [1]. However, I really like this movement, see its appeal and learnt a thing or two from these new [2][4], and old [3], online courses.

As others have pointed out here, watching a short video has very little transaction cost. That is true, however, for me the transaction cost with a book is often lower. With a book I can easily navigate to the interesting part. With the online videos, I never know if I can skip over the intro stuff. For instance, in Ng's ML class [4] a lot of the material, especially the majority in the first six chapters was familiar to me. However, had I not watched the first chapter I still wouldn't know the definition of a Hypothesis in Machine Learning. This problem exists with books, too. But I think skimming is easier with books.

[1] Underactuted Robotics http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-comput... [2] http://youtu.be/0yD3uBshJB0 [3] http://www.udacity.com/view#Course/cs373/CourseRev/apr2012 [4] https://class.coursera.org/ml/lecture/preview#close

GlenAnderson4• 14 years ago

And if you encounter a term that you missed by skipping the introduction it's easier, with a book, to quickly find where it's defined courtesy of the index.

kolinko• 14 years ago

I'm doing Farmacology right now.

petercooper• 14 years ago

This new world, where you can learn for free from the experts, is a dream come true.

What's the business model though? Because that can only go so long without the teachers/experts earning money.. and if they earn money, someone else must be also earning the money to pay them.

tomrod2• 14 years ago

I assume it was strictly donation at this point. If I were to design something like this (actually not that far off from a nonprofit I had in mind years ago), I would offer a freemium model: basic classes for free, more advanced classes for a fee.

qntmfred• 14 years ago

recruiting fees from employers for the best students

_delirium5• 14 years ago

So far it seems to be basically a "subsidized by universities" model. The people giving these lectures are earning traditional salaries in traditional professorships, paid for by a mixture of tuition, research grants, and (for state schools) tax money. Of course, that doesn't explain whether it'll be viable long-term for the universities to keep subsidizing it. My guess is they're hoping to either: 1) use it as a loss-leader that pulls in more traditional, tuition-paying students; and/or 2) use it as a loss-leader that pulls in some kind of other revenue source, e.g. impressing people at companies who are in charge of grant programs; and/or 3) charge at some point.

doe88• 14 years ago

I'm taking the cryptography course by Pr. Dan Boneh, it is awesome, it is really engaging, deep enough and all the material is very well done. Moreover I just discovered the second part of this course has been announced and is scheduled for early 2013, so it's fabulous.

All I can say is that for this course I would even be willing to invest myself even more (both in time and money) at the level of requirement of a graduate course. I really would be interested in paying the standart fee and follow the same course than the stanford students follow and have a kind of official credit in reward.

jpdus• 14 years ago

Yep, i liked the crypto course a lot too (took part in the first iteration in March).

The problem is that there is basically no "service" at all. The first iteration was delayed by several weeks (without any prior notice or status update) and there were several problems with the certificates (Ive gotten less programming credits than I should have and others had similar problems) but got no chance to get this corrected.

I guess thats the problem with free courses (and thats the reason I would like to pay some fee for it): You can just record the lessons once and afterwards repeat the course how often you want with very little updates - and very little help/service for students.

baby• 14 years ago

I'm taking the cryptologie one, very interesting but also a bit hard to follow. I'm on week 4 whereas week 6 is already on and feel like I won't have time to finish it by the time the exam happens :(

I've tried the sociology one but really didn't dig the first texts we had to read.

I'm waiting for gamification, python, object in french, crypto II, greek mythology...

Dn_Ab2• 14 years ago

Many of the computing and math courses are enough in my comfort zone that I can readily pick them up on my own. That, coupled with my belief in the future of quantative biology has made me sign up and take a number of chemistry, anatomy, medicine, drug, neuro and genetics courses. About 13 in all but only 2, no more than 3 per block of time which is good. The only outliers are the quantum computing and finance ones.

I've programm(ed|ing) a spaced repitition native app that uses ideas from online sequential learning to challenge me (hah online learning for online learning). I can look at performance graphs per topic area over time. For now it just scores roughly based on text similarity but I've built a parser I can use for the more mathematical ones. By the end of a couple of courses it should be a very interesting project. It currently additionally allows for searching and note taking but I noticed when I go over my notes I tend to go back and forth on certain concepts so I will implement a history concept and automatic topic map building (using both cookie trails and measures of similarity). An unintentional side effect due to Markdown support and html generation is that it generates something like a wiki but far easier.

pitt19802• 14 years ago

If someone came up with a good spaced repition app for retaining the learning from all these online classes, I'd be happy to pay $20 - 30 for something like that (market survey of 1)

eddie_the_head• 14 years ago

Hi, do you have an email I could reach you with? Your profile is empty.

tokenadult• 14 years ago

Who on HN is taking one or more of these courses?

I'm trying to get used to the model by taking courses that will mostly be for review (but I expect that they will get into some material that is new for me, or forgotten through lack of practice for me) such as

Statistics One by Princeton University starting 3 September 2012, taught by Andrew Conway

Calculus: Single Variable by University of Pennsylvania 27 August 2012, taught by Robert Ghrist

Introduction to Logic by Stanford University 24 September 2012, taught by Michael Genesereth

I'm currently in the Udacity introductory courses on statistics and physics, again for personal review and also to check them out for my children. I'm intensely curious about how this course delivery model will develop, so I'm jumping in to use the Massive Open Online Courses to study subjects I like to self-study anyhow.

stordoff• 14 years ago

The Intro to Logic course is pretty good IMO. The lectures are pretty dry (not much that you can do about that really), but the content is solid.

jonstjohn• 14 years ago

I took machine learning the first time it was offered, and took about half of the PGM class before personal commitments won out temporarily (it was quite demanding, 10-15 hours per week). I re-signed up for PGM so I can give it another go this fall. Quality was really fantastic. Some people complained that ML was not as hard as the Stanford class, but I probably wasn't expecting quite that level in a free, online class, so expectations on my end were more reasonable.

fuzzythinker• 14 years ago

Didn't know Hinton is doing a NN course. Hope he gets into the deep net stuff. For those interested too, link is: https://www.coursera.org/course/neuralnets

dysoco• 14 years ago

I signed up in Algorithms I and Functional Programming in Scala.

I'm also taking Algorithms in Udacity, but I don't really like Udacity too much.

Rickasaurus2• 14 years ago

I took ML Class (quite easy) last fall, PGM Class (a ton of work, but well worth it) in the spring and have just started the Quantum Computing class. Be careful, they're addictive!

jray• 14 years ago

I see that this course teaches rails https://www.coursera.org/course/saas

There is one that teaches Django?

mahmud2• 14 years ago

"Software as a Service" is an architecture paradigm: little of it is Rails or even web specific. In fact, any competent software developer should be able to get the gist of Rails, Django or flavor of the month framework in the proverbial weekend.

UK-AL2• 14 years ago

Indeed, but the nitty gritty of frameworks can months/years.

freshfey• 14 years ago

This is great and I'm really excited for the new courses. I'm currently taking Vaccines and Pharmacology from coursera and Statistics from udacity. These courses help me do exactly what no university let me: Learn about interesting topics from different areas. This way I can dive into a topic more deeply if it interests me, and if not I'll just know some basic principles. Jack of all trades, master of none is absolutely fine for me.

cpunks• 14 years ago

Interesting list. The one surprise is that Caltech choose to go with Coursera rather than the much more open edX.

henrik_w2• 14 years ago

I've taken two courses from Coursera. This spring I took Design and Anaysis of Algorithms part 1, and last fall I took Introduction to Databases.

Both were great experiences, and I learnt a lot. However, each course was many hours of work per week for me. There are easily 10 courses I would like to take from the current offering, but for me (have a family, working full time), the biggest constraint is time. Nice though to have the choice once you decide to take one.

I have written in more detail about my experience with Coursera: http://henrikwarne.com/2012/05/08/coursera-algorithms-course... and http://henrikwarne.com/2011/12/18/introduction-to-databases-...

hekker• 14 years ago

This is awesome! Signed up for Computational Investing and Dan Ariely's class on Behavioral Economics.

_delirium5• 14 years ago

Interesting. I'm hearing a bunch of stuff from colleagues at these universities, and it sounds like it may be a bit rough starting up, especially once it gets to the 2nd semester after these initial offerings.

It took most professors completely by surprise, and it sounds like there may not be bottom-up buy-in (was completely a management decision). In particular, at at least one university, profs are now being told that they may be required to teach a course via Coursera, or at least strongly requested to. And, the universities don't want to budget this as actual teaching, so it's just extra work on top of the normal class load: since Coursera courses aren't credit-hours, they don't give teaching credit. It's supposed to count under "service" or "outreach", I guess, the way serving on committees or reviewing papers or doing a CNN interview does. (This part may vary by university.)

Not sure that's a good recipe for high-quality courses via this method. The advantage of the first few courses is that it was a bottom-up decision by professors who wanted to do it, and devoted significant time to do it right, rather than having it assigned to them by management.

ramblerman2• 14 years ago

Wow, if that's true that's terrible news. The idea that professors would be forced into this.

If it is true however, there is still udacity, which is much more conservative in it's expansion.

_delirium5• 14 years ago

I should note that nobody is quite sure what will happen yet, so that may not be the case. A lot of people found out this was even happening the same time HN did! And the agreements were all signed at a very high administrative level (President or Provost level, which is often a political appointment quite out of communication with the day-to-day operations of the university), so it's not clear there is an implementation plan with dean-level or department-head-level administration yet.

We'll see, though. One thing universities are trying to balance is how to get professors to do more "entrepreneurial" kinds of things while staying. As professoring gets to be a little more like a freelance job (bring in your own research funding, teach online courses via a for-profit company, build up a personal "brand"), one question is what keeps the more successful professors at the university, instead of just going independent, the way Sebastian Thrun did. There's a real possibility that some of the launch professors listed in this announcement volunteered precisely because they're contemplating jumping ship to their own online-course startup, and are using this as a route to build name recognition and audience.

gavinlynch• 14 years ago

What is the general sentiment in the community about endeavors like this? Only anecdotes, but usually when I see an article like this find it's way to Hacker News I'll see a few posts from people describing themselves as part of the academic community discussing the cons of the way these are being rolled out and implemented.

_delirium5• 14 years ago

I would say mixed opinions, but considerable skepticism. Some of the skepticism is of how university administration will handle it; there is some suspicion there is no real plan and this is being done for purely "brand" reasons, so the university president can talk about "cutting edge" initiatives. Some of it is of the concept in general. Some of it is that it's a for-profit company, not a nonprofit with clear charitable goals. Worse, it's a for-profit company whose business plan is still unclear, so one doesn't know what their long-term intentions are.

But a lot of people are just undecided, waiting to see how it'll pan out. Probably not a lot of outright enthusiastic professors, except from the relatively small number who are actively looking to either jump to one of these startups themselves (like Sebastian Thrun), or at least co-found one (like Daphne Koller).

The Chronicle of Higher education's occasional guest op-eds are probably a decent representation of the range of opinion. Here are a cautiously positive and a somewhat negative take, respectively:

http://chronicle.com/blogs/next/2012/07/11/moocs-arent-a-pan...

http://chronicle.com/blogs/innovations/whats-the-matter-with...

snikolov• 14 years ago

I wonder why they couldn't (or didn't choose to) partner with individual professors on a per-course basis instead of entire institutions whose professors might not all be interested in participating. Is it because individual professors might not have complete autonomy to do so without the permission of the university? Or maybe partnering with an entire university ensures a greater and more recurring supply of courses? Or that the university might help incentivize what is surely a very time-consuming task by having a course replace some other service requirement?

pyoung• 14 years ago

Probably all of the above, although I think Udacity was created as a separate entity because the Prof's had some legal issues with Stanford. So having permission is probably pretty important.

Nrsolis3• 14 years ago

Personally, this is VERY exciting for me. The biggest challenge I have seen with traditional universities getting into "distance learning" is that they are very much focused on delivering a full "classroom" experience rather than tailoring the experience to the medium.

Example: many course videos are of a "live" class and are repeated for every semester regardless of the subject. Next to no re-use of course video is seen from semester to semester. The experience is very much one of time/place-shifting a class experience.

Also, the focus is almost NEVER on interactivity. As a distance student, you're VERY much dependent on your professors willingness to read and answer emails or post in forums.

I was very surprised that MITx had an IRC server set up for the EE class that were offering. I nearly fell out of my chair when I saw they had hundreds of people in the channel.

So, from my point of view, the biggest shift we are seeing is a willingness of the brick-and-mortar universities to consider working with a partner that is going to market their professors and university brand to a very wide audience and yet enough of an arms-length away that there is little risk to the "brand" if things go sour. The fact that there are NO for-credit courses is quite conspicuous and you should expect the universities to attempt to maintain an implicit separation between MOOCs (massive open online courses) and their traditional "residential" offerings.

That said, the writing is on the wall: the traditional model doesn't scale and financial pressure is going to push ALL schools towards this model in some fashion or they will simply become irrelevant. As I drive up and down I-95 in the Northeast, one of the things I've noticed is that there are a massive number of traditional schools advertising on billboards. This NEVER used to happen and most universities (IMHO) considered it a sign of desperation to advertise for students as opposed to recruiting.

What we are witnessing is a race developing. Think back to the early days of Yahoo/Altavista/Google. There are going to be some big winners and some also-rans in this fight. I'm betting on it.

Full Disclosure: I earned my bachelor's degree from Harvard via their Extension School and did the majority of my coursework online using their video delivery platform. I graduated in 2009 at 39 after a LONG absence from school to chase my fortune on the Internet. Best decision I ever made.

_delirium5• 14 years ago

That said, the writing is on the wall: the traditional model doesn't scale and financial pressure is going to push ALL schools towards this model in some fashion or they will simply become irrelevant.

I don't disagree there are all kinds of problems. But how does this initiative address any of the financial pressures? It does nothing to reduce the cost structure of universities; in fact it increases the cost structure by adding another thing their professors and administrators must do, not instead of but in addition to everything they currently do. And yet, it does not provide any new revenue streams to pay for that. At least, it doesn't unless there is a payment from Coursera to universities as part of this deal that hasn't been announced yet. My guess is that they're hoping to use it as an advertising loss-leader to attract students and prestige. But that would mean doubling down even more on the traditional high-tuition model, because that's what's going to ultimately subsidize the free courses.

Now if they charged for the online courses, I could see that making a difference in the financial picture. Maybe that's the longer-term plan, for-pay online courses with Coursera and the university splitting the proceeds. That would be closer to the Harvard Extension School model you mention.

moondowner• 14 years ago

Looking forward to Odersky's course Functional Programming Principles in Scala.

https://www.coursera.org/course/progfun

spacemanaki• 14 years ago

Kinda interesting that SICP is the first book on the suggested reading list. Too bad the start date is months away!

nessus424• 14 years ago

Odersky's own Scala book has some large examples that are based on sections of SICP. E.g., the digital circuit simulator.

tikhonj2• 14 years ago

SICP should be on the suggested reading list for basically all CS classes :P.

cow• 14 years ago

Great,that is awesome.

VinzO• 14 years ago

Anyone knows if such course exists for video game development?

vineet• 14 years ago

The Gamification course (https://www.coursera.org/course/gamification) seems to be a great resource.

It is one of those topics that there is not too much helpful material online - so I am looking forward to it.

johnohara• 14 years ago

The Coursera website is iterating change faster than it can add new courses. You can feel it going from 0 - 60 with each new visit. OTOH, it's also beginning to feel -- big.

Udacity seems more approachable and familiar. Oddly enough, even with 2000+ episodes, so does Khan Academy.

fhars• 14 years ago

And whoever programmed the "sort by start date" function of the new course overview page that went live yesterday or today should probably take the introduction to algorithms course :-). It looks like it sorts with a comparision function that returns a falsy value both for "no date < some date" and "some date < no date".

pm902• 14 years ago

Its great to see my university (Illinois) finally on this list. We already do record the more popular courses and make them available to students (internally its free, but if you're not a student you have to pay for it). However, it seems like the course that would be most useful (Computer Vision by Derek Hoeim http://www.cs.illinois.edu/~dhoiem/) is not yet on the list. I wonder whether the university will make that one available because when I took it there were a lot of external students (usually sponsored by their companies) and I'm sure the Uni made a lot of money from it

tikhonj2• 14 years ago

There's a computer vision class offered already: https://www.coursera.org/course/vision.

pm902• 14 years ago

I can't believe Jitendra Malik himself is teaching this! He is an extraordinary researcher in computer vision, and I would definitely like to attend this. Thanks!

UK-AlasGou2• 14 years ago

One thing UDACITY does better is that it is much more structured. They have courses that build on each other.

Coursera seems like bunch of interesting courses put together, rather than structured degree thing.

I think this is because universities see coursera as way increase its reputation with the public rather an alternative to university lectures.

TimPC• 14 years ago

The exciting part of this for me is seeing that some of the intro courses are taught by top senior lecturers rather than just professors. I've always found some of the best learning experiences for material that isn't heavily connected to research comes from people who's careers are in teaching rather than research. One of my knocks on Udacity was the whole PhD required approach to teaching intro CS, many of the best lecturers in first year CS don't have PhD's.

klipt• 14 years ago

I'm curious - why isn't UC Berkeley mentioned, but this course, taught by a Berkeley professor is listed on the right? https://www.coursera.org/course/qcomp

12 new universities join Coursera

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