It really strikes me how amazing the MIT professors are. In contrast, most of the Coursera courses have me tearing my hair out. Pet theories on how to structure a course, mumbling, stuttering, essentially reading power point slides - I am so glad school is a few decades behind me.
But in contrast, Strang, Sussman, et. al make the topic come alive. Despite having taught the same course over and over they can put themselves into the mindset of the student. Beyond that, they find the beauty in the topic, and are able to communicate it to inexperienced freshmen.
Anyway, the big difference I see is that MIT OCW films instructors in their natural habitat and all the Coursera videos are shot up close and personal and this makes some professors unusually self conscious. Others are willing to not worry about production values and let their warts and quirks come across - they will be informative but not particularly entertaining...e.g. Ullman or Sedgewick both of whose courses are really good if a student is interested in the topic.
Odersky himself is teaching Functional Programming in Scala later this month, and I'm looking forward to that.
Recently my memories of the first time I saw linear programming were triggered- those few pages in an algebra book were the last time for many many years that I felt "wow this is so cool" about math and I think part of my loss of interest during high school and pretty much entirely by college was that the subject was never revisited and instead there was a lot of looking stuff up in tables and not much with systems.
Anyway, I've been watching Gilbert Strang teach Linear Algebra on OCW. It makes me wish Abelson and Sussman could remake the SICP videos with another 25 years of in the classroom experience - Strang's presentation is masterful. And linear algebra after all these years is still awesome
http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/mathematics/18-06-linear-algebra-...