MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses)

• Baku wrote on 2014-01-07 23:23
  Anyone ever tried any?
  I saw a post on reddit while browsing the programming multireddit and got interested in quite a few of these, I knew about MOOCs before, but never really payed much attention to them, but I figured trying them out costs nothing, and if they end up being good and useful, better to have tried them earlier than later, and since I'm on summer vacation, I have lots of free time.
  
  I just enrolled on a few to check them out and see if I can get some extra learning done :) . There are a lot of free options out there, some had good reviews.
  
  I figured I'd try some that look interesting and see how it works out.
  
  Here's the ones I just joined, some can be started at any time, but some close enrollment at certain dates.
  
  Iversity.com: Web Engineering II: Developing Mobile HTML5 Apps
  Open2Study.com: User Experience for the Web
  Open2Study.com: Concepts in Game Development
  udacity.com: HTML5 Game Development
  udacity.com: Web Development
  udacity.com: Algorithms
  
  
  You can look at the following site to pick from a huge list of MOOCs:
  https://www.class-central.com/
  
  

  Class Central is a free online course aka MOOC aggregator from top universities like Stanford, MIT, Harvard, etc. offered via Coursera, Udacity, edX, NovoED, & others

  
  
  

  What are MOOCs?
  
  MOOCs stand for Massive Open Online Courses. These are free online courses from universities around the world (eg. Stanford Harvard MIT) offered to anyone with an internet connection. Several popular MOOC provider platforms have emerged, such as Coursera, Udacity, EdX, and NovoEd, that partner with universities and professors to offer MOOCs on their platforms.

• Tropa wrote on 2014-01-08 00:06
  Concepts in Game Development...
  
  This is indeed interesting, gotta look into this.
• Yoorah wrote on 2014-01-08 00:39
  I'm considering enrolling into a couple of programming-related courses to get some extra skills I may need for work later.. if I have time.
• Osiris wrote on 2014-01-08 20:27
  Sounds interesting. I have experience developing software on an enterprise level, but not really in the mindset of gaming. On the other hand, in college we touched on some gaming concepts in my software engineering courses. I think the closest thing to "gaming" we did was create a small game engine that creates a game based off the input file you provide it. With this kind of stuff, there is ALWAYS room to grow though.
• koifish wrote on 2014-01-08 23:10
  this looks way better than following video playlists off youtube to learn stuff, I think I'll try some over my summer break to keep my coding knowledge refreshed.
• Baku wrote on 2014-01-09 00:13

  Quote from koifish;1185886:

  this looks way better than following video playlists off youtube to learn stuff, I think I'll try some over my summer break to keep my coding knowledge refreshed.

  
  
  Dunno about other topics, but as far as programming goes, there's lot of good info / teaching material in written form, while most of youtube stuff is basic and/or simply bad.
  
  But these MOOCs look pretty good.
  
  __
  
  I did some of the Web Development one I mentioned above, seems basic level touching on some semi-intermediate stuff on later lessons. So not really useful for me since I'm above that level (though I did learn a few things here and there by skimming on some of the last lessons), but I'm gonna recommend it to anyone wanting to start with web-development, it touches on concepts you HAVE to know to save you a lot of headache, yet lot of web programmers never really learn about them properly.
  
  
  And the UX Design one, so far so good.
  
  I'm most looking forward for Iversity's Web Engineering II to start.
• Brynn wrote on 2014-01-09 01:38
  I'll let you guys tell me how it is and I'll take it into consideration. Taking 5 classes this semester so I'm ok with not trying it out myself this time
• Campylobacter jejuni wrote on 2014-01-09 12:02
  Looks like I'm going to be a professional economist without any monetary investment in my training soon. How cost-efficient is that? :smoke2:
• Hanna wrote on 2014-01-11 20:59
  Cs50 <3
• Chockeh wrote on 2014-01-12 01:54
  I try to do some on my off-time, but I'm usually overwhelmed with schoolwork. I know quite a bit of C, but I want to extend my knowledge to languages such as Java and improve my Python and HTML abilities. I also need to brush up my C++ since I've only been working with embedded systems for the past year.
• Baku wrote on 2014-01-12 02:57

  Quote from Chockeh;1187117:

  Java

  
  
  ew
  
  

  HTML abilities

  
  
  What does thou mean by this exactly?
  
  HTML is just markup, it's piss easy to learn in 3 hours (plus a few more to learn how it works with the browser, like the document object model -DOM- and stuff.).
  
  It's the stuff that works with it that takes time to learn like JS, CSS, or the back-end that conects to the HTML and dynamically creates it (depending on technology used: Python, Ruby, PHP being the most popular ones)
  
  

  Python

  
  <3
• Yoorah wrote on 2014-01-12 05:46
  Learning Java is not "ew" if you want to become a professional programmer. xd
• Hanna wrote on 2014-01-12 07:55

  Quote from Yoorah;1187154:

  Learning Java is not "ew" if you want to become a professional programmer. xd

  
  
  It is ew and by ew I mean I struggle deeply with it
• Chockeh wrote on 2014-01-12 09:05

  Quote from Baku;1187128:

  
  What does thou mean by this exactly?
  
  HTML is just markup, it's piss easy to learn in 3 hours (plus a few more to learn how it works with the browser, like the document object model -DOM- and stuff.).
  
  It's the stuff that works with it that takes time to learn like JS, CSS, or the back-end that conects to the HTML and dynamically creates it (depending on technology used: Python, Ruby, PHP being the most popular ones)
  

  
  
  I meant HTML + CSS specifically when I said that. I can make basic web-pages, but I want it to look pretty.
• Campylobacter jejuni wrote on 2014-01-12 09:33

  Quote from Baku;1187128:

  What does thou mean by this exactly?

  
  
  It's "dost".