MOOC Platforms Critique

Not just on Udemy, but for MOOCs in general: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16745042

Even if 5% people(say 5000 people) complete the course, whats wrong in that ? 5000 is still a big number. Many Prof's wouldn't have taught that many students all their life. I have myself completed 7 courses from edX,udacity and coursera. Each of these have a different approach. Udacity for beginers while edX and coursera have some advance courses and I found these courses a great supplement to my course work at my school.

When you pay for Udacity/Coursera/etc you at least get human interaction with paid instructors and other students.

Did you tried coursera classes? Some of them are bad, but if you choose carefully you can have great learning experience. The way teachers work, difficulty and quality are very different, so there is high chance there is one that would satisfy you.

EdX really got to me with their removal of past class materials and the "class starts today" dark pattern, and the constant certificate upsell attempts. Something like freecodecamp and Udemy is much more usable IMO.

After Coursera/Udacity/EdX discontinued courses that I wanted to take, or removed access to ones I only partially completed, I switched to buying classes on Udemy. I completed only a handful of many purchases, and the quality level was okay-to-mediocre but better than nothing, so I got more value out of Udemy than Coursera.I also found that Youtube videos are just as informative as Udemy classes, but they're not always as well structured.The MOOCs had some pretty cool/i

See comments on reddit too: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/4njrt0/golden_...

Problem with Coursera / Udemy is they just scratch the surface. Almost all courses are introductory and don't go into depth.

Agreed, in my experience (primarily with Coursera and edX, which are admittedly different from Udemy/Udacity in their focus), the recent wave of online courses or "MOOCs" mostly boils down to video lectures being made readily available online. For my purposes, this is just great! The content is often very high quality, and I have yet to pay for a course since so much is available for free.

I remember trying to 'enroll' in a courera class that had already ended and was unable to access the contents. that was infuriating to me. it's defeating some of the greatest advantages of online learning, namely that it can be self directed and self paced.I am a udacity fan for this reason. Udacity seems to be the one most likely to experiment with how to maximally leverage being online and having nontraditional tools available.