[mattcdrake]

Most online courses I’ve taken (university or MOOC) were not improvements over simply reading the textbook/source and doing the published exercises. I have taken a handful of online courses from “real universities” and they have all been atrociously bad. Some MOOCs I have taken have been much nicer (Ng’s Machine Learning stands out). Courses on platforms like Udemy seem to almost uniformly consist of regurgitated documentation. Maybe that’s helpful for someone (or they wouldn’t be so popular (?)), but I find video to be a slower and less dense form of info transmission.

The main thing I find annoying is that most of the courses I’ve tried don’t leverage the interactivity available to them. The exercises don't seem to have the right level of challenge to enable flow. In college, I took a linear algebra course with lectures on one day and group work on the other. On the second day, we’d have a difficult application problem of whatever we learned earlier in the week. We’d break into groups (small enough that you couldn’t hide) and work through the hard problem together. Each time, I’d leave the class feeling like I had truly gained a deep understanding of the subject matter.

In contrast, most online courses (if they have exercises at all) seem to be of the form: show pattern, change obvious detail, ask for obvious implementation. I haven’t found a lot of exercises that actually require a stretched understanding of the material to get through. Maybe this is optimized to mitigate huge drop off rates in MOOCs - easy problems keep people around longer. But, that doesn't really create a valuable learning experience.