Is anyone here taking online courses e.g. Udacity, Coursera, Udemy, EdX, etc.? What do you think of them?

I've tried learning for free off of youtube for various programming languages, but most of the time if not all the time. Whoever's running a series of tutorials just suddenly stops midway. So I end up going to another person for those tutorials and then they teach it in a different order and even then they also stop.

I end up picking up Udemy for certain topics that I can't rely on youtube for like programming. It's ok. Some courses are really terrible though. You don't even need to be a professional to teach on Udemy which is it's biggest downside. That being said, there is a 30 day refund period. So if you think the person has no inclination about how things work then I'd say do get a refund and look elsewhere.

Generally, the ones you want have a lot of users on the same course, with a certified professional and with lots of hours. This mix doesn't always work for some topics though.

I've tried the other types like Edx and such, but their relevant courses to me had me use really obtuse programs or I couldn't understand the lecturers English and there were no subtitles.

I'd say if something's a full course for free, try that over youtube. If you have problems with them, move onto a paid course.

Also on Udemy. ALWAYS wait for sales. Lots of courses without sales will cost 200 euro or such, but with sales they can be as low as 10.

Also while we're on this topic, that really advertised site brilliant.org is really terrible for actually teaching anything useful. So avoid there.

I'm currently taking a Udemy course on how to use Unity to make 2D games, it's a little boring and has started blagging my head in the third section but if it gets too difficult I know I can just Google individual things or ask for help in the community resources.

As for if it will help in a career, well I'm not sure but it's quite unlikely. I've never had a job, and I have a degree in all sorts of subjects and have experience in business, market research, programming, web design, and a lot of voluntary work spanning over a few years. I don't think recruiters in I.T. want anybody who doesn't have the ability to effectively run their business for them, only thing you can do is get lucky - unless you happen to be the manager's relative. I would like to be able to remake games and port them, then I'd like to start learning how to emulators are made, just because it fascinates me.

Also I must admit I chuckled at the post above in terms of YouTube tutorials, the people who write them always stop half way through. In my case, they also have annoying technical problems with their uploads that make their information hard to digest. The advantage of learning platforms like Udemy and Lynda is that instructors have an incentive to update their learning material and replace entire videos if they have to.

I also agree with the point that the best courses are the ones with certified professionals and lots of students and reviews. Even if the instructor simply has a nice voice and has gone through the effort to learn the skill themselves before passing on the information in a clear and precise format, it makes the resource for learning that much easier. On the other hand, someone who is barely fluent in their targeted language and is basically copying off another persons' course doesn't deserve your money and unfortunately there are a lot of them out there.

I've taken a course on Coursera recently and am currently doing another one. So far I'm pretty pleased with their model and there's some good stuff available for free. It's not deeply exciting video material, very lecture-style, but what I've seen so far is well produced and researched.

I have taken a couple of Udemy courses on web dev. I've had quite a positive experience so far perhaps because I took recommendations from friends and for one of the courses, a friend and I learned the material together. I really prefer the code-along style courses, as I learn well when I have examples in front of me, and can pause the video to play around with some code and guess-and-check. I wouldn't pay full price for a course, but paying $12-$15 during a sale is well worth it for me, especially if a friend recommends it.

I'm from Brazil and i'm taking a course in shell scripting on Udemy. I'm liking it so far. I always wanted to start programming so i decided to start with something i have contact every day.

It's not for job purposes, mostly hobby, but i found better than trying by brute force. Half of it i already knew, but there are a lot of new lessons and things are starting to click for me now.

I tried the first one and asked for a refund because the guy wanted me setting up a virtual machine to be able to dig deeper, but i didn't want to go that far. I got the refund without any major problems, no questions asked. Choose another popular one and i'm pretty pleased.

It's not very exciting though. Mostly a guy speaking and editing code in vim. Also wait for sales on Udemy, things get cheap often.

I took Andrew Ng's ML Course on Coursera. I thought it was good, but the sound levels were pretty bad in his lectures. The content was great and informative. It was more for fun than anything and I enjoyed it. The 'active learning' co ponet of having dealines helps a bit to both motivate and excuse the time.

There are lots of free courses through MIT as well. Like I said, the deadlines do help one to push through and accept a certain level of understanding.

I haven't taken another, but I am still studying 6 nights a week (AI and ML mostly).

I'm not taking any currently, but was involved with the revamp of the Android Fundamentals course with Udacity (proof [1] ) and just would like to echo your sentiments about gnashing teeth.

The problem is that these companies don't really care about quality teaching. I got a few ideas in there to improve the learning process, but at the end of the day, it comes down to quickly iterating and moving on to the next project to increase the breadth of their catalog.

The way things worked is that Google (the SME or Subject Matter Experts) partners with an instructor from Udacity to help produce, direct, script, etc. Udacity handles all the dirty work and so all the SMEs have to do allegedly is create the course material. Long story short, it was many long nights for the SMEs, and the level of effort was in no way reciprocated by some on the team at Udacity that could have helped make the course better for all involved. I was just continually frustrated by the fact that they didn't seem to care about helping students, but rather wanted to just get things done. I get that it's a corporate environment and blah blah blah, but it's still frustrating to see that, even at the highest level, the product is not really what the product claims to be. I think we need to reevaluate the way these things are judged. Something along the lines of truly evaluating what the student can do. Easier said than done, but still think the point stands.