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Ask HN: Is there a MOOC provider that deals in more advanced topics?

by teapot01 on 8/9/18, 2:46 AM with 11 comments

I enjoy learning new things and expanding my area of expertise outside of the work that I do, usually I try to do this through reading, conference talks, and online courses.

Lately though, I find that a lot of the MOOC courses from coursera, et al. tend to be written for complete beginners and provide very lightweight courses. Because of this I tend to disengage from the course and not complete it.

Are there any MOOCs that are more suited for continuing professional development?

A side question is how can these courses ever hope to replace university level training?

  • by hawkweed on 8/10/18, 12:25 PM

    In depth technical books, like for example[1], are very rare these days. Competent people are busy building systems, frameworks and making money. Some of these guys are talking on various conferences, but IMO just to present themselves to various companies. To put it simply they are mostly in a business of selling their time.

    Systematic approach of learning particular topic through the books is deprecated these days. One of the ways to expand knowledge would be building stuff. If you are into distributed systems, implement something small and build upon that (i.e. implement raft[2] or build distributed rate limiter). There will be many problems and I'm sure you will learn a lot along the way.

    [1] "Design of Unix Operating System by Maurice Bach" [2] https://raft.github.io/

  • by csnewb on 8/9/18, 5:23 AM

    IMO once you're past the beginner stage of learning a technical topic (which is what most MOOCs provide), you have to either develop side projects or work on open source projects to learn more advanced concepts.

  • by solomatov on 8/10/18, 12:31 PM

  • by 5_minutes on 8/12/18, 11:14 AM

    I would recommend normal online trainings (which you can do without pressure), getting some good books and have the discipline to stick with it.

    MOOCs are trendy but hard to keep up with if anything uncertain popups up in your life, or you can't keep up because you don't have the skills yet etc.

    MOOCs in it's current form are not particularly interesting unless, or even sustainable for the large audience it's been appealing to --- unless you're a student or someone with plenty of time.

  • by pravula on 8/9/18, 4:19 AM

    A side question is how can these courses ever hope to replace university level training? - https://www.edx.org/ Some top tier univs there offering courses and degrees.

  • by cvguy on 8/10/18, 12:05 AM

    Udemy? It may not be a MOOC though but what's in a name if it serves the purpose... Also, O'Reilly Media is good. The only (major) downside is that they are not free (but largely affordable, methinks).

  • by orsenthil on 8/9/18, 5:23 AM

    Yeah, those are called textbooks and you start by solving the problems given in each lesson. You could start with the algorithms book written by the author named Knuth. I 've heard the problems are really challenging.