Coursera vs. Udacity

The Coursera platform can be a useful part of your overall learning content portfolio if utilized correctly. It's fantastic for asynchronous courses that don't necessarily need a dedicated faculty member (though I'd highly recommend at least having some discussion moderators/student workers) and for offering MOOCs. The ability for the learners to contribute translations really makes it ideal for the international learning community - I am always amazed to see a course we launched with 2-3 languages to quickly have 10-12 more added. This feature really helps expand the audience reach and Coursera has such a large following already that it can grow seemingly overnight.

Incentivized

It's suited well to support on developing a project and following a set curriculum to get things and material in order. Also it has the idea of a nano-degree as the mini-certification to focus on working through a program over a course of a few months. It's more of an interactive course and best for having access for a set period of time. It helps to prepare well for exams but less beneficial when it comes to more applications I find, and should not be used to supplant any resource, but to use in conjunction with.

Incentivized

• Interaction: the student learns by doing. For programming courses, this means programming!
• Assessments: the courses I'd taken ask students to grade each others work with a rubric. This is hugely effective and permits tests and quizzes to be other than multiple choice.
• Creativity and enthusiasm of the instructors. Some of the approaches demonstrated real out-of-the-box thinking by the instructors. For example, the Rice Python course was a self-contained website requiring no installation of IDE on one's computer, and the final project was a working version of Asteroids.
• Low cost of entry: most of the course I enrolled in were free, with an optional fee for certifications. This really gives people the freedom to explore learning. It's almost like a Public Library of Learning.
• Coursera forces a weekly discipline on the user with lectures and assignments and this really motivates one to put in the effort.

Incentivized

• Courses are very high quality and updated regularly.
• Instructors and Mentors are available for live tutoring.
• Relevant projects are assigned in order to keep learning material fresh and top of mind.

Incentivized

• Some of the courses (very few) have some old information (more than 2 years), and in some areas like technology the information has to be very new and updated.
• Some professors or people doing videos are not good in front of the camera, they should train their people a little bit more for those things.

Incentivized

• Quiz questions in some cases could be made clearer. I didn't feel the questions were always phrased in a way that I could easily understand what was being asked.
• Requests for support can sometimes take a very long time to get resolved.
• Cost structure changed from a fixed-price model to a subscription-only model, and prices are significantly increased as such.

Incentivized

Constantly renewing already. One of my favourite MOOC platforms.

Incentivized

User-friendly and developer-friendly Web UI.

Incentivized

They are already very good. But, would be great if Udacity improves the area of standardizing offline projects and exercises so that people could attempt to work offline. Including documentation on how to do it. More practical or real-world projects to choose and work on after course completion. Maybe a community can do it.

Incentivized

I’ve used it a couple of times and... that did great. They take their time, but in the end they solve your issues.

Incentivized

I didn't personally have any issues with the program, but scheduling time to review the final project was easy, and the assistant was pleasant to work with.

Incentivized

Coursera is familiar, intuitive, compatible and easy to use and implement.

Incentivized

I think Coursera has the best overall interface. I think you will find that different platforms go in different directions, and have different specialities. For the most part the differences are more in the types of courses they offer than one being particularly better than the other, so it comes down to content for me.

Incentivized

I combined my learning from various platforms and did on exclusively reply on any one. However, the free courses in Udacity lacks the comprehensiveness as Coursera.

Incentivized

• The greatest benefit of Coursera is access to quality courses on various subjects that you can either browse or dive in deeply. Customizable, flexible and accessible.
• Helps our department to recommend trainees courses on this website and gain important knowledge. Also, the courses are provided by big-name universities which helps students in their careers
• Developing and exploring professional skills.

Incentivized

• I am already in a great position as a CTO with a great company. I hope to be able to build some new technology with what I am learning, but I haven't applied any of it yet to my own real-world problems. I will though.

Incentivized