How I got my dream job in the tech industry without a CS degree

Re:How I got my dream job in the tech industry without a CS ... by YZF on Tuesday March 14, 2017 @08:11PM (#13872773)

I can't comment on this specific MOOC but I've done MOOCs where there were a lot of quizzes, active forums, extra-curricular activities, and involvement from the course staff (E.g. Dan Ariely's on Coursera). Those are certainly better than just reading a book or watching a video. I think there was still a very high dropout rate. Having any sort of online community certainly helps as well.

I've learnt to play the guitar online. I did a couple of music related MOOCs. I use YouTube resources like JustinGuitar and Lick'n'Riff. But I still felt like I needed a real teacher and went and got one. Even though this teacher is probably not at the same level of some of the YouTube "gods" :) I still got a lot out of that.

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Re:How I got my dream job in the tech industry without a CS ... by ghaff on Wednesday March 15, 2017 @09:37AM (#13875957)

In general, I've found the forums on MOOCs pretty useless other than for dealing with specific technical issues with the course itself. They just don't scale well and there's a huge disparity in the level of the participants a lot of the time. In programming courses, you've got some people asking about some nuance of an algorithm while others aren't sure how to install a text editor. Any course built around having meaningful discussions in the forums has been a tire fire in my experience.

Automated code checkers are definitely useful but, other than that, I'm not sure I've found MOOCs much different from watching YouTube videos. Nothing wrong with that--especially with top-flight lecturers--but they're hardly revolutionary. Videos of lectures have pretty much been a solved problem since VCRs went mainstream.

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