MOOC good vs bad

I have undergone a dozen of MOOC courses with cool groups like coursera, udacity, khanacademy, edx etc

As expected I completed a few and dropped off a few...

From a student's point of view, I am convinced now that the success of a MOOC depends on the following in the decreasing order of importance:

1. Teacher.
2. Course content.
3. Pedagogy.

The knowledge/educational qualification of a teacher plays an unimportant role in motivating/convincing a student over the internet. Remember, this teacher can't be reached beyond the video. In my understanding, a teacher's job is to install the basic building blocks and motivate the students so that the students rediscover the wheel by themselves. Spoon feeding doesn't help at all if you really want to "learn". I found that a number of teachers on the MOOC just failed to convince/motivate me. The were lecturing as if a student will approach them outside the class to clarify the doubts!
In at least four courses I found an interesting pattern. If you don't have access to the books, you will fall flat on your face. I could smell that the content was designed as a teaser, you know what I mean, like those movie teasers! No free education. hehehe

Andrew Ng vs Daphne Koller

I completed Machine Learning @ Coursera taught by Andrew Ng.

I am in the first week of Probabilistic Graphical Model taught by Daphne Koller. And I am feeling the heat! :)

Although the content and objective of the courses are different. But in my experience Andrew is a better teacher.

Andrew uses very simple sentences. He speaks at a consistent rate. After each class you will always feel like exploring the topic by yourself. Andrew gives you enough to build upon.

Daphne uses very very heavy sentences. Sometimes you will find her speaking at a good intelligent rate and the other times she speaks really fast. She rarely breaths between two sentences. Trust me if you haven't already studied the topic/chapter you won't understand the videos a bit. After going through her videos you won't have enough energy to explore the topic further. :P

One of my fave from Daphne is:
"So here the structure is actually a sparsity in the transition model as opposed to something that manifests at the level of the 2TBN structure which is fairly simple."

ha ha ha

The smart content of Coursera and Udacity

I have been studying few subjects on Coursera and Udacity. The content of these courses are designed very smartly. Most of the times you would feel confident after going through them. But let me warn you, you might be suffering from overconfidence. They are not complete, they are just meant to introduce you to the topics. So better take some time to explore the chapters elsewhere to really appreciate the subject in depth. Their objective to keep the lectures short to avoid distractions has this subtle side-effect.

Happy learning!

Teachers!

For last few weeks I have been studying online with Andrew Ng on coursera.org  and Salman Khan on khanacademy.org. Both them are superb teachers and I observed these similarities:

• They have a very warm and straight forward approach while discussing matters.
• A good sense of humor.
• They know what to hide and what to share on a topic. When you have teachers like that even an average learner like me won't get intimidated with the vastness and complexities of subjects.
• They strongly encourage learning attitude against the attitude of outshining others. 
• They are very modest and always discuss their shares of failures very constructively.

This is going great! May they continue to succeed in their endeavors!