Ask HN: Crowd-sourced educational resources recommendations?

1 point

6 years ago

As a college student (MSc Computer Science) I often encounter the situation that I am sitting in lectures that suck. The content is very interesting, but it is presented in a very bad or boring way. Most professors are not really interested in providing the best education possible (they want to do research) and therefore their performance and material (and recommended books, papers etc.) are moderate at best [0].

As a solution I head out to YouTube [1, 2], Goodreads, HN threads [3], GitHub pages [4,5] and MOOCs, Medium posts, Google [6] etc. to find alternative material to learn from. While there are some indications of quality/learnability (comment sentiment, ratings) it is still hard to judge which material is best. I want to find the material that best suits my learning needs so I can learn more efficient and effective (and thus more).

I was wondering whether a crowd computing platform (for learners, by learners) could help to collaboratively select and judge material. After searching for a topic there is some sort of rating (up/down votes) and difficulty classification {easy, intermediate, expert} to help you easily find the material that suits you best as a learner. Material can be anything from books, lectures, papers, webpages to complete MOOCs and pages of universities offering their courses for free [8].

Any thoughts on this?

[0] - https://www.ratemyprofessors.com/ [1] - https://www.youtube.com/user/eaterbc/ [2] - https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLD63A284B7615313A [3] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15398550 [4] - https://github.com/josephmisiti/awesome-machine-learning/blob/master/books.md [5] - https://github.com/ossu/computer-science [6] - https://seeing-theory.brown.edu/ [7] - https://www.acm.org/binaries/content/assets/education/cs2013_web_final.pdf [8] - https://stanford.edu/~shervine/teaching/cs-229/refresher-probabilities-statistics