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Comment by mFixman | Hacker News Reader

I completely agree that trying to get an education/certification model with no feedback and simple, robotic questions is completely useless.

What's even worse is that almost none of the MOOCs used the strengths from online classes. There are other ways to learn than a hour-long video of a person talking to a webcam.

It's funny how a big part of Andrew Ng's classes is waiting for him to write text with mouse as if he were using the world's worst whiteboard; he could have prepared properly-drawn figures in advance.

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> It's funny how a big part of Andrew Ng's classes is waiting for him to write text with mouse as if he were using the world's worst whiteboard; he could have prepared properly-drawn figures in advance.

My personal experience actually showed otherwise. It was more effective for me to learn if instructors write on a whiteboard to gradually develop what they teach. I guess that's because when an instructors writes a whiteboards, students will know exactly what she focuses on all the time, and the writing speed matches the speed of understanding. In contrast, a professor in my university was a big shot on operating systems. He used well prepared slides and he talked fluently, yet I got lost in almost every class.

Many studies have shown watching things happen over time is much more useful for the human mind than being presented it completed.

That being said, one way to achieve this is to play things backward or occlude detail while you get to the final creation.

students are more engaged with the lesson when the teacher handwrites compared to when teacher uses slides / ready-made material

They could at least use a Wacom.

>They could at least use a Wacom.

This, when they draw with a mouse, even after tons of lectures, it always looks like shit. The good ones use tablets and change colors and thicknesses and such as they go.

To be honest, instead of wasting time on writing, the professor could share anecdotes from history, his life, industry, and other aspects i.e. the social aspect of doing science and research. I really find those interesting than mere cut and dry exposition of concepts.

Udacity had a great Python course back in the day (Programming 101, for Python 2.7)

It had vidoes and then a REPL would drop down and you would continue writing your program, test it against test cases and then a new video would go on for a few minutes explaining the theory for the next step.

I can see why not many try and do this. It obviously took a lot of work, both technically and pedagogically to set up the course and problems.

Worthless is greatly exaggerating imho. I learned quite a bit from these courses even though they were far from optimal.

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