I agree with your assessment. Most of the MOOC websites have shifted to being much less academic, more applied and are pushing paid credentials. It doesn't seem like most of the top universities are creating much new content for Coursera or Edx compared to 2013.
I mostly use MIT open courseware for self learning. A lot of course websites are also online and if I hear about an interesting course at some University I'll just google the course number. Stanford online and MIT ocw have a lot of lectures on their YouTube channels and I've found some interesting lectures just searching YouTube for a topic. When I wanted assignments and lectures for Russell and Norvig's AI textbook, I googled "Russell AI course" and stumbled on Berkeley's AI course. I've been enjoying it.
How has the social aspect + taking the course with others helped you in the past? I never found it that important. But I have always preferred self learning even in college.
Doing a full college course is such a time investment and it usually takes a few weeks to start proving the interesting stuff. I find it more fun to look to shorter content for inspiration. I might realize I don't understand the fundamentals of the topic and then seek out a way to study it.
MIT OCW is great, I'm very grateful to them for doing this. Still, it's closer to books for me than to MOOCs by overall experience.
I have never used much websites for the on-campus courses, they are rarely self-contained and require more organization and research to use. There is one good feature of those: they often have excellent assignments that you often won't find in textbooks, so I think can be a good complement to a textbook.
One thing that bothers me though is that these can go down at arbitrary time and you can't be sure it works properly. E.g. a website for 2013 course may have some of the links broken and you will only find out when you get there. Still, better than nothing and I appreciate greatly such initiatives.
>How has the social aspect + taking the course with others helped you in the past
First of all there was just a general excitement "A course just opened and there are like 40 thousand of us". If you spend time around people that would do things like that than I guess the effect won't be as striking. But 40k was like a half of the population of the town I lived in. It felt like a part of something huge.
In general, thinking that many people go through the exercises right now and struggle just as I am was somehow motivating and uplifting. Reading that something had the same issues as you 5 years ago vs right now somehow make quite a bit of difference for me.
Then there is interaction. Getting your questions discussed and helping others on the forum is totally different for me than just browsing through a dead forum section for a possible answer to my problem.
I had a technique: when I completed something I would go to forums and read questions, and then try to answer them at least in my head. Doing so with a "real" questions that are waiting for an answer is more engaging because in addition to practice you also help someone.
And the most insane thing that only happened once: competition. I was doing Sedgewick's algorithms and the automated grader itself was brutal. I loved the course so much that I took it twice, the second time doing all assignments to 100/100. But in addition to the grader there was forum section where people would show their stats (how fast their solution worked). I remember cutting my time only to discover next day that someone did better, and then half excited half suspecting that the person simply trolling with fake numbers would go and try to optimize my solution even further. I would wake up at 5am to work on it before work, the whole place is messy with drawings on paper, etc. I cannot imagine doing the same thing when reading a book.
That's a great story! Thanks for taking the time to answer my question. You make good points.
I've experienced links not working. In fact, Berkeley's AI course (https://berkeleyai.github.io/cs188-website/) includes 3 contests but the server no longer accepts submissions for testing let alone actually competing against other students.
There have to be a lot of other people like you and I out there reading textbooks and looking at OCW but never talking to each other. A simple discord server for MIT OCW would be something. I'm currently frustrated because I'm working through the text, lecture notes and problem sets for MIT 6.045J: Automata, Computability and Complexity[0]. But there are no solutions to the problem sets! It's a proof based course and I just want to sanity check if my logic is actually valid.
I mostly use MIT open courseware for self learning. A lot of course websites are also online and if I hear about an interesting course at some University I'll just google the course number. Stanford online and MIT ocw have a lot of lectures on their YouTube channels and I've found some interesting lectures just searching YouTube for a topic. When I wanted assignments and lectures for Russell and Norvig's AI textbook, I googled "Russell AI course" and stumbled on Berkeley's AI course. I've been enjoying it.
How has the social aspect + taking the course with others helped you in the past? I never found it that important. But I have always preferred self learning even in college.