One thing I've found somewhat odd is how seriously people take the timeline on coursera courses. To me one of the biggest weaknesses of these courses is the hard time constraints.
For all of the courses I've taken (ML, PGM, NLP, SNA) I've followed roughly the same pattern: follow the course for 50-70% of the material doing all homeworks etc. Take what I've learned and go off do some fun projects. Once I hit a road block return to the course and finish up (usually months after the course is 'officially' done) typically forgoing the homework being I've already created 'homework' for myself.
Compared to my classroom experiences, I've found that this method greatly enhances the benefit of the materials I learn later in the course, as well as allowing me to more strongly reinforce material learned earlier. This is also something that physical classes simply cannot emulate. I do find it a little funny that I've never officially completed a coursera course, despite having covered much of the material very thoroughly. Hopefully as these courses continue we'll start to see them adopt patterns that extend beyond replicating the limitations of a physical classroom online.
Just to provide a counterexample: for me, the hard deadlines are really helpful. That, along with the near-instant feedback, are what make the experience so much better than just watching a series of lecture videos. They act as a motivating factor & help prevent me from getting too sidetracked by things where I wouldn't be learning as much.
Maybe that's an area where online classes can innovate further: hard deadlines could be optional. People like me who want them could enable them when they start a course; people like you who don't, could disable them instead.
There are several studies showing that hard deadlines usually result in better performance and higher completion rates, so you're not alone[1]. It also has the advantage of creating a community on the same page as you are.
So there's no clear-cut answer. Making hard deadlines optional could very well cause more damage and less completion even if it's better for a few individuals. I hope that Coursera is collecting analytics on how people perform with different types of deadlines, so that they can come up with the best overall solution.
I've done a number of MOOCs now, and I've learned to ignore the timeline in some cases. Sure, I don't get a certificate, but that's never been the point for me.
I just learned about the Neural Net class about a week ago and it's scheduled to end today. I decided not to let that stop me and went through all the lectures in a week. I'm going to have to watch a lot of them again, and I need some time to work with the concepts, but I enjoyed 'cramming' it all in one big gulp.
On the flip side, I stopped doing the Computational Finance at week 8 of 10, but I'll go back and finish it up over the holidays.
And on the third hand, the Modern American Poetry class I did was best done following the timeline, so that I go to participate in the forums at the same time as everyone else. That was a very forum heavy class, though, which is rare.
Anyway, I'm just glad all this stuff is out there now. I've learned a ridiculous amount in the last year.
Same here. I already have degrees and the certificate of completion doesn't do much for me. I value the knowledge and want to use it for fun projects. I am really annoyed by the course format for Coursera and the other clones. They should let anyone access the old archival videos for all their courses. Frankly, I'd pay for that.
How are the different online-education websites in terms of being able to take courses at your own pace? I'm interested in trying an online course out to pick up some statistics and machine learning, but I probably wouldn't be able to follow it week-by-week (and not having to wait for a given start date would be great).
All Coursera courses are deadline based. Some of the courses remove their material at the end of the course. Others, such as the database one, are later opened up as self-study but do not offer a certificate of completion.
In the case of edX, MIT's 6.00x course is strictly deadline based. CS50x allows you to take the course at your own pace as long as you finish everything before the 13th of April, 2013.
But those aren't the ones you're looking for. Udacity meets all your requirements. They have open enrollment, meaning you can join in at any time. Furthermore, they have no deadlines. As long as you complete all the problem sets and give the final exam, you get a certificate.
Here are some Udacity courses that might interest you:
Something I found out recently: there are many courses that pull their course material when the course is finished. Even if you are/were enrolled, you lose access. I found this out from the Statistics One course (since you mention statistics), which cut me off in the middle.
Obviously, you can avoid this by downloading all the videos and slides as soon as you have access.
It depends. Some courses are operating on a schedule and once they're closed you can't access the materials. Other courses operate on a schedule but have elected to keep their materials open.
Asynchronous learning will definitely play a major role in the future, as will a more fine-grained graph-navigation approach, because there's a wide spectrum of the world population for which the September-May, two-semester academic calendar doesn't make sense, but the problem is that it's hard to integrate testing (and certification) into that. Answers to exams will appear on the Internet at some point in time, so the exam questions will have to be refreshed continuously.
Academic honesty is probably the biggest hurdle that online education is going to face. Once grades for these courses start to matter (and at some point, they will) there will be people in the world who will try to cheat.
For all of the courses I've taken (ML, PGM, NLP, SNA) I've followed roughly the same pattern: follow the course for 50-70% of the material doing all homeworks etc. Take what I've learned and go off do some fun projects. Once I hit a road block return to the course and finish up (usually months after the course is 'officially' done) typically forgoing the homework being I've already created 'homework' for myself.
Compared to my classroom experiences, I've found that this method greatly enhances the benefit of the materials I learn later in the course, as well as allowing me to more strongly reinforce material learned earlier. This is also something that physical classes simply cannot emulate. I do find it a little funny that I've never officially completed a coursera course, despite having covered much of the material very thoroughly. Hopefully as these courses continue we'll start to see them adopt patterns that extend beyond replicating the limitations of a physical classroom online.