My State of E-Learning #elearning #coursera #udemy #udacity

Recently I’ve gotten the online learning bug back, not that it’s ever away for long, so I’ve been busy again on Coursera. And thanks to a HTML 5 course I also started to use Udemy. An Eric Ries course is waiting on Udacity for me to start it. In the past I used to use iTunesU to follow online university courses, such as Yale’s Game Theory Lectures by Benjamin Polak.

Coursera

I’m currently enrolled in 6 courses, and I’ve followed a number of courses here, yet none to completion within the time period set by the tutor. Often the amount of time I would need to set aside for the course can be between 6 and 12 hours each week, this is entirely possible and I often do manage to do a couple of hours in the evening. Another issue is that to receive course credit these Problem Sets need to be in at a certain date, or courses which have been running over 1 week it is often impossible to submit these on time to be eligible for course credit.

Coursera does allow you to download all the video’s, so it is possible to view these at a later date, or even from the beach somewhere. And they sometimes offer the course multiple times, so in the example of Model Thinking I have enrolled a second time so I can complete easier.

Coursera also makes it possible to earn a Verified Certificate, for Model Thinking it is possible, for a fee, to get official recognition from a University and Coursera for your accomplishment with a verifiable electronic certificate.

Udemy Courses

Udemy

I’m currently enrolled in 3 courses, and busy with 2. As Udemy allows courses to be completed in my own time it is much easier to miss a couple of days. The tradeoff is that I don’t get course credit. There are also far less courses, and less languages to choose from than Udacity or Coursera. These courses are hosted on YouTube, similar to Khan Academy and can not be downloaded for later or offline use.

Udacity Courses

Udacity

I’m currently enrolled in 1 course, and have completed none. Udacity, which boasts supporting 63 languages, is again lacking course credit. What it does have are big names who are teaching courses, these courses look like they are extensions of their books, and as such can have large fees attached to them. Here the parts of the course can be downloaded, although for the most part they have not made it easy to do so.

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