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Personally, the old saying
Not only is a book the better teacher, it also has more character.
holds mostly true for me. Most classes, that I remember to be superior to the experience of a good book, were either because there simply wasn't a good book, or the teacher was extremely charismatic, or both [1].
However, I really like this movement, see its appeal and learnt a thing or two from these new [2][4], and old [3], online courses.
As others have pointed out here, watching a short video has very little transaction cost. That is true, however, for me the transaction cost with a book is often lower. With a book I can easily navigate to the interesting part. With the online videos, I never know if I can skip over the intro stuff.
For instance, in Ng's ML class [4] a lot of the material, especially the majority in the first six chapters was familiar to me. However, had I not watched the first chapter I still wouldn't know the definition of a Hypothesis in Machine Learning. This problem exists with books, too. But I think skimming is easier with books.
And if you encounter a term that you missed by skipping the introduction it's easier, with a book, to quickly find where it's defined courtesy of the index.
Or courtesy of being able to quickly scan and skim the pages. And that's the same reason why videoutorials are inferior to traditional, text-and-screeshots-based tutorials. A point worth keeping in mind IMO.
Completely agree. However, the advantages of the Coursera courses are that they follow a schedule, have quizzes and assignments, and have active forums where you can ask (and answer) questions.
I easy to buy a book on an interesting subject (I do it all the time), but it's much harder to actually read it, especially if it's on a challenging topic.
For me, the best solution would be if the courses had the material available in text form as well. Then you could choose how to learn (video or text - I would choose text).
I have the same problems with books. I think this is because books tend to cover a lot of material. A short course on the other hand can focus in a self contained subset, which you can expand later.
Right. So maybe, the ideal education material is more what was imagined in the past. An interactive book with quizzes including videos and high-res pictures in the places where it makes sense.
Personally, the old saying
Not only is a book the better teacher, it also has more character.
holds mostly true for me. Most classes, that I remember to be superior to the experience of a good book, were either because there simply wasn't a good book, or the teacher was extremely charismatic, or both [1]. However, I really like this movement, see its appeal and learnt a thing or two from these new [2][4], and old [3], online courses.
As others have pointed out here, watching a short video has very little transaction cost. That is true, however, for me the transaction cost with a book is often lower. With a book I can easily navigate to the interesting part. With the online videos, I never know if I can skip over the intro stuff. For instance, in Ng's ML class [4] a lot of the material, especially the majority in the first six chapters was familiar to me. However, had I not watched the first chapter I still wouldn't know the definition of a Hypothesis in Machine Learning. This problem exists with books, too. But I think skimming is easier with books.
[1] Underactuted Robotics http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-comput... [2] http://youtu.be/0yD3uBshJB0 [3] http://www.udacity.com/view#Course/cs373/CourseRev/apr2012 [4] https://class.coursera.org/ml/lecture/preview#close