[superasn]

My answer is very general and I only have experience taking a lot of online courses via sites like udemy but the key factor that makes any course stand out is practical real life examples. It makes everything super interesting and you learn a lot more quickly.

Also I've seen that a bit of humor does wonders for learning. Recently did an online course called StatQuest with Josh Starmer(1). I never knew stats / ml could be made this interesting.

(1) https://www.youtube.com/user/joshstarmer

[newsbinator]

Perhaps an unpopular opinion, but I feel humor detracts from a course most of the time. It's like breaking the 4th wall in cinema: you can do it, and some people do it to great effect, but as a rule you probably shouldn't.

Dan Ariely is unusually gifted, so his humor works.

For the vast majority of courses, I prefer when they stick closely to the material, so I can watch it at 1.7x or 2x without breaking stride.

[Dowwie]

Dan Ariely made extensive use of humor in his lectures and it made a great difference