I noticed this about all those "machine learning courses" that are getting posted here. Facebook and Google basically hand them out for free, hundreds of hours worth of quality learning material. Top universities let you watch all their lectures online. So what's the catch? Why aren't we all machine learning experts already? Because it's hard to muster the energy unless you commit to earning a degree by, yes, studying for exams. Turns out that's actually thousands of hours of work so the "convenience" part of online courses kinda starts to fade.

I definitely noticed that the quality difference between a good university and a bad one is often about how much they value "education" beyond just being an "exam machine". Presenting facts from the point of view of someone new to them, presenting methods of how to deal with edge cases and traps, taking one-on-one tutoring sessions seriously.

But yea, the end result is getting confirmation for having passed a bunch of exams.

MOOCs for purely pedagogical reasons are sometimes hard to find in ML, not only for the aforementioned reasons, but creating a MOOC is simply resource intensive. It follows that many of the producers that truly value education are actual universities. Hybrid models like Coursera and Udacity are still trying to figure out how to get out of the red.

All of this to say that I'm still very grateful for content creators who go beyond simple framework tutorials.

Even though the concept of an MOOC has been around for quite some time now, it's only recently that their curricula at the course level is actually consistently on par with what would be seen in a good university environment (think like "Top 50" University).

There's also the problem of knowing what you don't know. If an expert in the field is educating you they will give you a full picture of the field and what's important in it. But if you're self taught you can miss entire areas and never realize their importance from reading academic sources.

I'm not against self teaching or MOOCs at all. I just think they need more structure and require more commitment to be as useful as university is to society. They're a bit too casual, requiring much more self drive which is harder than just setting deadlines and exams.

I wish there were more courses breaking down the algorithms in the latest research papers and actually implementing the models .