I thought this might be interesting to some of the people who are thinking about career changes towards programming.

https://www.edx.org/courses

While the computer science modules are not the only available courses with this scheme I thought linking to the module overview would be best.

I think the general idea is it would allow you to get a taste for if programming/computer science would be interesting to you while not having to make the commitment (financial and time) of full time education.

Although I have already done a course on "Foundations of Artificial Intelligence", I have decided to do the similar module available as a CV booster and for the fact that does expand on my previous knowledge towards the end of the course (and gives me a reason to finally learn python.)

I would love peoples thoughts on this as I currently can't see a downside and wonder if I have overlooked something.

Either way I hope this post helps someone in some way...

EDIT: While I know all about the reputation of MIT and Harvard, Berkeley is relatively unknown to me. Does anyone know what the reputation is like within the US.

Berkeley as a research University is of the same caliber as MIT and Harvard (and in CS is much better ranked than Harvard). These online courses provide a real service. Only thing that's not great is that a lot of the courses remove major aspects of the original course that can't be handled by an automatic grader.

For instance, a lot of the original, live versions of coursera courses had a project or theory based component, but those often get skipped. Usually an algorithms or intro to machine learning class requires proofs, but it's kind of hard to deal with grading proofs for classes over 10k students. This is probably why there are no real math classes. Similarly, the original version of SaaS has an open-ended team project, but again that becomes hard to coordinate as you scale and offer it for free.

A+ especially in the tech community. I'd go as far as saying on par with MIT. Stanford folks like to make fun of them because they have the valley and all.

If you have ever heard of the BSD unix variants, guess what the B stands for

I wonder if both CS courses were designed to be taken side by side.

Clowntable, I hear you as well as a lot of other people, including some friends who I respect a lot, saying degrees are generally not worth much and school often doesn't matter. Do you think it's the same for MIT/Stanford/CMU/Berkeley grads?

In the IT world...what matters is code people can look at imo. Opinions on this vary and a degree is never bad but ideally you release code people can look at while getting said degree.

Someone with merely a CS degree is going to have to convince me and have a good explaination why I can't look at any code he produced.

I pretty much don't care about the name of the school either. The one good thing about having a degree from Stanford/MIT etc. is that you have already ben vetted by someone else. Stanford has the additional edge that it's the best networking school for startup/IT land by a pretty good distance.

[Noteworthy: I am currently an academic teaching AI]

Have some classroom Java experience and am currently self-teaching sql server to try to gtfo of dealing cards. Signed up for both the CS intro courses. Hopefully with some programming knowledge the time requirements listed are a bit generous

Will post back with TR once courses begin.

Wondered about trying the SaaS one... my programming background is not great but I think that I learn very quickly and whats the worst that could happen right?>?

A lot is going to depend on who you are trying to get a job from too though, the bigger the corporation to more impact credentials will have over code, at least to get into the list that goes to the guy who cares more about code than credentials.

I'm signed up for the MIT CS course. As a complete noob, do you guys think it would be a good or bad idea to try to do the Harvard CS at the same time?

University of London is joining Coursera and they will be offering programming courses.

Not sure of the details yet but UoL are a large long-time provider of full external degrees and they have an infrastructure of examination centers so it could push things along quickly.

qualifications are coming to edx as well. Pearsons is joining to provide test centers.

I broke down and signed up for the Berkley AI course that's starting today. It's my first online course. I've seen a moderate amount of the material before, but have never used Python. I'm hoping it doesn't chew up too much of my time.

No one is gonna be impressed that you watched some videos that MIT attached their name to.

If you want people to be impressed, you actually have to get accepted and study there. People have compared these online classes to the real classes and the online stuff is comparatively a joke. You get minimal or no interaction with the professor and students, and the problem sets are 10 times easier. That's what someone wrote about the Berkley AI class specifically after taking both.

For these online classes, just pick what you are interested in and keep your fingers crossed that it won't be a waste of time and you will learn something.

Signed up for the two CS courses. I've been interested in trying to learn a few languages mostly Obj C so we'll see if there is some value in these courses. I'll note i'm pretty inexperienced with coding.

IMO.

FWIW I've built and deployed SaaS apps with Rails and am enrolled in the BerkeleyX Rails SaaS course. I'll report on it after its done. I don't think these courses legitimize you as a programmer and someone to be hired but hopefully they show you the way or are a sign of your interest in becoming a programmer.

Should definitely attempt some of the classes before down-talking their difficulty. I think PGM, which is currently running, would make you want to tear your hair out.

Ok, initlal knee jerk reaction of the BerkeleyX SaaS/Rails course is that David Patteron needs to STFU about hardware. It's a software class, Mr. Patterson. Suck it up and accept the fact that you aren't doing hardware anymore. He really comes off as one of those guys that thinks hardware people are greater than software people and is lameting on his previous life and we software people should feel so lucky to have him in our presence.

Hopefully Armando Fox is better.

The AI one looks pretty good so far. I need to find someone from our design department to build me a cute AI-guy for my slides, too
I kind of know what they will do and they have a slightly different focus than my lecture but it's pretty nice to see the take of other people on the same material.

If they use pacman the way I suspect they will that could be fairly awesome. I'm already concidering borrowing that idea.

6.00x starts in about an hour.

I feel like I showed up on the wrong day but I didn't. So far I'm not impressed by edx.

They said Monday, October 1st at 10am EST is when the 6.00x class will start and the forums along with material will be available. It's now almost an hour later and nothing is there.

Edit:
Guess they meant 11am because it went up at at 11am not 10.

Week 2 of AI was also behind schedule. Otoh, it is free.

Yeah, I guess. Week 1's CS was pretty good for what it is. The platform is nice too. Looking forward to the upcoming weeks.

AI is pretty great. I want those cute robots...I need a mascot for my lectures that's gold.

dave are you taking the PGM class? doing it with octave? what are your thoughts on it?

I started the NN class on coursera. I dropped it in the 4th lecture when the instructor said, "When you multiply the two together to get the derivative of the cross entropy with respect to the logit going into output unit I..."

I suspect I could've passed the class, but I already felt baited and switched when python was promised, but Octave was the sole supported language (though code isn't submitted, so there were no hard restrictions). I was already learning Python for edx-AI and didn't know Octave. I'm sure it was a good class for future researchers or high level practitioners, but not someone looking to add a little novelty to games.

otoh, the AI edx class is hitting the sweet spot. It's concise, moderately difficult, and I'm coming away with techniques I feel I can put to use. I highly recommend it if you're interested in that sort of thing.