MIT's 6.824: Distributed Systems (taught by Robert Morris) is completely open and available online, and it includes video lectures, notes, readings, and programming assignments from as recent as Spring 2020 (including half of the lectures recorded from home as the pandemic strikes). The assignments even include auto-graded testing scripts, so you can verify your solution to the assignments.
It's not necessarily a MOOC in the exact same vein, but given that the knowledge you gain from a MOOC is the valuable part (as opposed to any completion certificate or check mark), it's still extremely valuable and a great opportunity to learn.
One of the best courses i had taken on Coursera was the Algorithms series by Robert Sedgewick. Apart from going through the lectures, i had obtained a great satisfaction from solving the assignments.
But this year, i have taken up the lab assignments for the following:
https://cs144.github.io/https://tc.gts3.org/cs3210/2020/spring/info.html
I started that course, by my God his presentation is so...sleep-inducing for me. Contrast this with Peter Norvig, who is engaging and scintillates with passion about the subject. By contrast, Sedgewick has this smirk on the whole time, and talks in a monotone. His content is first rate, of course, but sheesh, he's got to work on that pedagogy!
This course is incredible. If anyone who had a hand in putting it together is reading, they have my thanks for putting out such an incredible course. I've done 2 labs and 5-6 lectures of this course so far and I find it absolutely worth it. I just wish I were a bit more disciplined about it (the pandemic made a lot of things harder for me). My goal is to eventually finish it and then make my own version of the Distributed KV store (perhaps in Rust?), and then perhaps even do a good Databases courses.
So far, it's allowed me to dive deep into how Map Reduce works, I even presented GFS in a local Distributed Systems group, and was able to understand Raft. I'm currently doing Raft labs (which is when the Pandemic happened). I've designed some sharding schemes in my previous company and worked a lot on Streaming systems but learning the theory behind everything is amazing.
If there are people here who would like to put a serious joint effort into doing this course, I would absolutely 100% be interested in it. Doing this alone from my apartment in a foreign country gets a bit tricky vs doing it in a group setting. :)
Are the auto graders sufficient in verifying the solution ? Often the TAs have their own private scripts for enrolled students. Just a detail I wanted to know :)
I was wondering whether this might be "the" Robert Morris, made famous by the internet worm. After a glance at his MIT web page I concluded, no, this is a different Robert Morris. This one looks much too young! But he is the Robert Morris.
I mean the profile mentions he co-founded Viaweb. Viaweb was the company started by RMT and PG which got acquired by Yahoo. Interesting that YC is not mentioned in his profile though.
There is an active Clojure study group that just formed, for anybody interested. I've started lab 1 and am finding it incredibly interesting so far.
For anybody who has completed the 2020 spring version (the lab code recently changed), did you have any issues with the lab 1 test script? I think they left out the merging files part when porting to the 2020 version which causes tests to fail.
Can’t recommend this enough. I have been going through this, but have hit a rough spot because of Coronavirus and an ongoing Internship. It is the first thing I need to resume once my Internship ends.
It's a great course but am I the only one a bit annoyed for the amount of questions during the lectures? I noticed by looking at the schedule many of the lectures don't cover all the material they are supposed to. He runs out of time.
It's not necessarily a MOOC in the exact same vein, but given that the knowledge you gain from a MOOC is the valuable part (as opposed to any completion certificate or check mark), it's still extremely valuable and a great opportunity to learn.
https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.824/