Coursera and Stanford Courses
One of the main things I’ll remember this spring for is taking a whole bunch of online courses from Stanford University, mostly available on Coursera. By the way, Coursera itself is apparently built entirely on open-source tech and recently got $16 million in funding.
Back in the fall, I signed up for a ton of courses, most of which were supposed to start in February:
- Machine Learning
- Human-Computer Interaction
- Natural Language Processing
- Design and Analysis of Algorithms I
- Compilers
- Cryptography
- Introduction to Finance
- Venture Lab
The start of the courses got delayed, but by mid-March, two of them had launched: Natural Language Processing and Design and Analysis of Algorithms I.
For the most part, my impression of the courses is really positive. They’re better than almost any conference talk video I’ve seen, both in terms of sound quality and how the material is presented. In terms of presentation style, they’re probably closest to actual university lectures and seminars.
Every week, depending on the course and the instructors’ imagination, the workload looks something like this:
- A bunch of videos to watch with in-video quizzes
- A homework assignment, for example: implement an algorithm based on QuickSort or build a miniature search engine
- A quiz on the material you just covered.
Usually, you can submit assignments multiple times, and they take your best score.
At the end, they tally up your score, and the course instructors send you a digitally signed PDF to certify that you’ve successfully completed the course.
Now for the sad part. I passed the algorithms course, but I ran out of steam on the Natural Language Processing one. The thing is, there were two assignments that required knowledge of English grammar. I’ve always been pretty bad with grammar rules, even though it doesn’t seem to stop me from speaking and writing correctly — I just have an intuitive feel for it, I guess. Anyway, after killing about six hours on each of those assignments, I decided to just skip them, so I ended up just a little short of the passing score. On the other hand, I still achieved my goal for the course: to broaden my horizons and learn something new :)
And one more thing, that’s both funny and sad: now when I watch pretty much any other video on the internet, I really miss having playback speed controls. You get so used to them :)
P.S. Things here are still under construction and getting set up; there will be a few more sections besides just this blog. Any advice on the design would be much appreciated.