I'm asking because there seems to be an extreme bias towards beginners courses, or content that is rather limited in breadth and depth compared to what a university might teach during a full masters degree.
ie, there's about 50 security intro courses (with lots of overlap of course), one "advanced" course that's been delayed for long and isn't all that advanced (Crypto II from Stanford), but nothing that even comes close to the various full-semester courses covering particular niches that I took in university (for example, we did one full semester course on each of: symmetric crypto, asymmetric crypto, side channels, "special topics" (random stuff), a cryptoanalysis lab, and 3 more niche things - and those are just the pure crypto courses, and even/especially within that area I feel I've barely scratched the surface).
These university courses cover not only more topics than Coursera covers (overall; there are many things even in this niche that Coursera has that we weren't taught, which is neat), but within each we went into considerable depth. In particular we tended to approach them from a rigorous mathematical perspective (number theory, linear algebra, statistics, proofs, etc). My worry here is that Coursera might be more geared towards people that don't need to learn the topics well enough to be actually able to use them professionally, let alone academically. ie, more like edutainment than education (no offense intended. I wasn't sure if I should include that sentence cause it might sound harsh, but I think it illustrates what I'm getting at).
We also didn't have courses that are blatant advertisements (#18568).
I don't want to put Coursera down (quite the opposite), I am genuinely interested in your answer - Is it just me not seeing everything available? Is the field I'm (slightly) knowledgeable about an outlier? Or am I missing the point of Coursera (maybe it's more focused on training industry professionals than academics than universities?) Or is it correct, and if so, is it intentional or unintentional? Is there a single field of study where Coursera could replace a university partly/largely/mostly/entirely? Will there be?
If you want classes that are more advanced or that go into greater depth, I recommend the courses offered by edX or Stanford-online or MIT OpenCourseware. These are full-term for-credit courses with video lectures at top schools that you can 'audit' for free, though few or none will grade your homework or projects unless you pay full tuition. By contrast, 95% of Coursera or Udemy courses are much shorter and more introductory.
I would expect people who take advanced courses to rate systematically differently from people who take beginner courses. For comparisons between similar courses it's probably fine, but would be hard to use the scores to compare the value of beginner courses to advanced courses.
Of course, even the definition of better here is so ill-defined it probably is of no practical significance.
If you want classes that are more advanced or that go into greater depth, I recommend those offered by edX or Stanford-online or MIT OpenCourseware. These are full-term for-credit courses with video lectures (MIT, less so) at top schools that you can 'audit' for free, though none will grade your homework or projects unless you pay full tuition. By contrast, 90% of Coursera or Udemy courses are much shorter and more introductory.
Oh, thanks so much for that! This link showed me I have interest for things I did not even know existed on the platform.
I mean, Mountains 101, Poetry? Awesome!
You can also filter by subjects i.e Computer Science, Data Science. Humanities, Mathematics, etc.
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