Because I’m majoring in philosophy for my One Year BA program, I’ve not had the chance to enroll in any of the computer sciences courses that have anchored the contemporary MOOC project since it got kicked off at Standard University with technology classes that are still some of the most popular courses on the Internet.
In order to give Degree of Freedom readers/listeners the chance to learn what these computer sciences courses are like, I’m joined this week by Ethan Solomon, a recent graduate from MIT who decided to throw himself into some of the most challenging technology-based MOOC courses this summer, and look at them both as a student and as a journalist who has already written on the subject of massive online courses during his time as editor of MIT’s newspaper The Tech.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: RSS
MOOCs that run your code on their servers won’t be letting you run highly efficient code for hours on end as the interviewee suggests.
Also, the Algorithms course on Udacity required some algorithms to run in a certain time forcing students to think deeply about optimisation (and/or look for hints on the forums).
The more difficult the MOOC, the more important the forums become just to get through. Over time more and more hints build up.
sorry, that should have been ‘inefficient’