Ask HN: What are the best MOOCs you've taken?
Most fun: Pat Pattison, Songwriting, Coursera. Very good lectures, very good material, very well presented. Teaches a lot about writing song lyrics in just 6 weeks, breaks it nicely down to steps and recipes. I used to think that the best feature of MOOCs is the automatic grading and feedback from programming homework, but in this course, for the homework songwriting you gave and got feedback from 3-5 random people in the course, and it was not only useful but this feeling of togetherness with strangers was even better than getting instantaneous feedback from a bot for programming homework. Shows that teaching art scales to MOOCs as well.<p>Nicest: Andrew Ng, Machine Learning, Coursera. Interesting topic, well-planned material, very well avoids going into the mathy details, but still conveys a feeling of understanding of the topic, so accessible to a wide audience. (Martin Odersky, Functional Programming Principles in Scala, Coursera, was almost equally nice, but had some rough edges in the first run.)<p>Most interesting: Probabilistic Graphical Models, Daphne Koller, Coursera. Very interesting topic. I took the first run of the course and it had lots of rough edges. Needs a lot of work to apply the lectures to the homework. I haven't seen such a demanding course since I took quantum mechanics at university.<p>Best organized: Jennifer Widom, Databases, Stanford. This is not the flashiest of a topic, but oh boy was it well organized. Runs like a clockwork. Everything in the lectures is relevant, everything from the lectures is applied and tested in the homework, there is lots of homework (but still not enough to make you remember SQL,XPath,XQuery,XSLT for the rest of your life if you don't keep using them), weekly homework has a nice progression from simpler things to medium difficult things, and the web environment is well designed, and gives wonderful feedback and guides you to get your queries correct.