I have finished today the second week's lecture videos in Saas - CS 169.1x by BerkeleyX. I must say my experience has been a rather disappointing one compared to edx's other online college course offered by MITx this time, 6.00x - Introduction to computer science and programming in Python.
First of all, the lecture videos were too many for only one week. There were three lectures discussing different topics with several videos each. Too much content to digest in one week. I understand that this is an advanced course but this does not mean that you have to put so much content that it take a whole lot of time to watch. Instead, what they could do is organize the lectures in smaller parts and put some of the to-learn concepts in the finger exercises. Learn by doing. But this is not happening and the reason is quite obvious to the to the students of Saas. The lectures are not designed for the online course but rather for the one that takes place in Berkeley's campus. When you design an online college course you don't just take a video of the college's class and put it online. This is what BerkeleyX is doing though. Both in CS 188 - Artificial Intelligence and in Saas, the lecture videos are designed in the same way. This makes it hard for the online course's students though as besides time-consuming, it also makes you feel like you are not the one this course is aiming at, that you do not get enough attention.
On the contrary, MITx seems to know better who the audience is and how to please it. the lectures are split in many small videos of 6-7 minutes each where you look at the professor's face talking to you directly. The finger exercises are also quite different. Firstly, they are more and secondly, they are better organised. They're not only multiple choice. they are more sophisticated, aiming not only at understanding the key concepts of the lectures but they also introduce new ones, making the learning experience interactive and certainly more interesting.
Well, it seems that BerkeleyX wants to differentiate itself from from MITx and the other university-partners at edx, due to marketing and status policies. This shouldn't affect the students in a negative way though. It would certainly be helpful if they became more extroverted and show that they care for their students worldwide by making classes specially for them and their needs. Those MOOCs are introducing a new revolutionary learning experience but sometimes it seems like they don't have enough faith in it.
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