Coursera used to be good, and I've found the occasional good course on Udemy, but neither are particularly great right now in my opinion. Well curated learning materials are such a unicorn.
I’ve purchased many Udemy courses over the years. The subscription plan they’ve been pushing makes no sense financially. I hope I’m wrong but I worry that eventually being a subscriber will be the only thing they offer.
There was one course I did gor mongoose, muber I think it's called. I really liked it as a student because it's all very bite-sized and you could stop/start whenever. They do recaps at the beginning.
Compare that to a 6 hr video on YouTube, next day you already forgot what the timestamp was about.
It's been a while since I took a Coursera course but I LOVED it at the beginning. Between Machine Learning, the (numerical) optimisation courses and NAND-To-Tetris (even for the platform alone) it had so many great courses to pick from.
I did Andrew Ng's old Machine Learning, Obarsky's Scala course, the Ng's Deep Learning specialization, Nand to Tetris part 1 and a small Data Science course which wasn't very good. I think my very first course was "Model Thinking" course, but I never took the exam there.
I also tried the sequel to the Scala course at one point, and the Cryptography course, but I dropped out from those after finding out they were a bit too hard - I spent way more time on the coursework than I'd intended.
But I can't say I like the direction it's taken in recent years.
Agreed about Odersky, the Scala course and the Scala Functional Programming course were solid (the latter a bit less so, a blemish was its insistence on Akka, but the concepts were interesting).
There was also a very interesting introduction to Programming Languages (by Dan... something? He was from the University of Washington I think) which covered multiple paradigms and had interesting things to say about the ML family.
We have free coursera at work. But I really hate it because it enforces random deadlines on you. Even though the courses are completely prerecorded and absolutely don't need any kind of deadlines. I just want to study at my own pace.
Compare that to a 6 hr video on YouTube, next day you already forgot what the timestamp was about.
I also tried the sequel to the Scala course at one point, and the Cryptography course, but I dropped out from those after finding out they were a bit too hard - I spent way more time on the coursework than I'd intended.
But I can't say I like the direction it's taken in recent years.
"Model Thinking" was great!
And I really liked the gamification course by Kevin Werbach (The topic was still hot back then) - something I used extensively at my start up.
There was also a very interesting introduction to Programming Languages (by Dan... something? He was from the University of Washington I think) which covered multiple paradigms and had interesting things to say about the ML family.
It isn't about competition, but rather getting market dominance early. =3
So to add Udemy's infinite catalogue of poorly structured courses, it only adds to the decline
I also hate all the gamification.