HN Reader

Those courses that were basically “we’re a top university and we let someone record the class from the back” were a literal life changer. Honestly, that was all I wanted.

Everything that came after has been substantially worse. Work is gamified, teachers spend more time building an audience than creating the product… it’s all horribly tainted by profit.

If we went back to recording lectures by the worlds best and putting it online for free with attached books and exercises, we could improve the world a lot.

Something never felt right with how Udemy promoted courses. I used to have a top selling course there, selling thousands of copies a month and now it gets basically no sales but it's still one of the highest rated courses in that niche on their platform. It's just no longer ranked or promoted by Udemy, for years.

I have no evidence of this but my personal opinion is their ranking is probably not fully automated and they have special offers and deals with certain instructors and if you're not a part of this club, oh well.

Again, it's all speculation but I can only go by what my numbers are. They were small scale life changing and now nothing but the quality of the courses I produced didn't change. It doesn't make sense. Of course it could be one big coincidence too, but this has been tracked and analyzed over years.

YT has tons of quality instruction - hell nowadays I just ask an LLM to make me a course for whatever I wanna learn.

But this press release makes me sad. At one point both of these companies had big visions for how online learning should happen. To read the announcement, it sounds like they’re being held hostage by a management consultant. There is so much gobbledigook and so little clarity about how to help people learn.

These platforms lost because of YouTube…not AI.

On Coursera, I did Andrew Ng’s machine learning course and Dan Boneh’s cryptography course and both were excellent. Time well spent IMHO.

The next thing I want to take is a WinDbg course. Udemy has one that looks pretty good. I should probably also find a modern assembly language course…

They, unfortunately for some good sources like edX, managed to brute-force themselves into the mainstream, which is quite sad.

I remember some of the early days of "Into to AI" and courses like that, Udacity in early days (with courses from Steve Huffman, Peter Norvig, Sebastian Thurn) and how they managed to help me learn so many things.

I would be very surprised if people can say the same for today's array of options.

edit: omg I just looked at coursera and it's so bad!

it's all "AI this" "AI that"

who uses all that stuff? who wants that? the whole site looks so sad now. the OGs are still there but there is so much crap around it

But in the last couple years both have been horribly run. Hopefully the AI threat lights a fire. I suspect a well designed course with some context engineering can become far better than ChatGPT by itself.

Incredibly sad to hear this. Coursera was transformative for my education and it wouldn't be an exaggeration to say it changed my life for the better.

I know these open courseware platforms have been bad for many years now but this feels like the final nail in the coffin for Coursera. I'm just grateful my education happened to overlap with the advent of the open courses movement and before they realized it was never going to be profitable.

I like the idea of having some professor of high credential US university given lectures about the things in some accessble way and I think this has a huge value, but at least for me, since Udemy is more about tactical courses in 10 out of 10 times I will go with the person in the market that pulled a course que a great and non-exhastive content bringing all the tips and tricks of the market, even if he/she does not make the bad in the background.

I do not see those 2 things co-existing if Coursera impose it.

- create a platform to host content others create

- get employees to ask for company-provided access

- almost none of these employees really use it

- collect subscription revenue indefinitely

Something tells me the outcome will likely be the same -- years of trying to get competing systems to get aligned or absorbed, attrition of all the most important people who are ready to move on and do more interesting work, and ultimately a poorer experience for the customer.

But what do I know.

Being able to skim, jump around, re-read a paragraph or pause on a single sentence is how understanding actually forms for me.

What’s interesting is that LLMs lean hard into this strength of text, they make it interactive, searchable, and contextual.

To me, most of these platforms have optimized video for engagement. Its essentially "press play and hope it sticks".

No idea about whether the courses on there are still any good.

I'm very sorry to see it go.

Coursera's model will still survive for a while, given people's desire for branded credentials (university degree credits or company-branded certificates)... until the university bubble bursts too in a 10+ years. Start of trend: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/poll-dramatic...

A bit of a plug: we tried building a consumer business, with a learning experience built atop these LLMs: https://uphop.ai/learn . Still offered for free to consumers, but we're now succeeding much better on B2B ("you either die a consumer business or live long enough to become B2B" was v true for us).

Despite that, a large portion of the interview focused on my grades from my time at University, and the specific course-work I had taken. Note that this was for application engineering, and it wasn't my first job out of school. About half of my frontend engineering session was the interviewer focusing on my single sub-B grade (got a C+ in Operating Systems). Mind you, my overall CS BS GPA was a 3.5 from a top-10 engineering school, with a 3.6 in major-specific courses. It seemed like the team was largely Stanford grads, and they really, really, really cared about GPA and school-- basically playing right into the legacy education system.

I knew at that point that there was no way the company was going to "disrupt" anything with regard to education.

Udemy was generally crap.

Coursera was decent.

Crap eats decent.

I’d love to see long term usage data on MOOCs. They had so much promise though I don’t know anyone who uses them post-LLM though it could be I live in a bubble.

Coursera somehow got to be not good. I subscribed to the premium thing and it is not worth for me. I'd rather pay for the courses and do that on my time.

Udemy does that "promotion" nonsense to "encourage" to "buy it now" which I think is lame. It is not like they are steam. They are just cycling through the list and add 1000 bucks to whatever is not there. Also they store your cookies and track your device for that. That's despicable

I wish Coursera to rethink this decision and to rethink on the platform itself.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gagan_Biyani

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39612710

The few times I spent a few bucks, out of curiosity, on some technical courses with near perfect scores, was horrified to find the instructor could barely speak English, audio seemed to have been recorded out an internet cafe in some 3rd world country, and explanations were shallow or confusing.

The surprise was not that a $5 to $25 course was bad. The surprise was the mismatch with the numeric rating, reviews and student testimonies, compared to actual course content. I can only imagine, most reviews are fake and the rating system has issues.