"And it all went!" Or again about Coursera and others like him

Hello habrovchanam!

First, thank you, habrovchane! It was from you that I learned about such a wonderful project as Coursera.
At one time in 10, I decided that I wanted to enroll in one of the technical universities of Vienna - I have been living in this city for quite a long time. I had some very general understanding of what php, mySQL, was, by the edge of my ear, about the existence of RoR, and it seemed to me that web programming is extremely cool and that this is what I would do.

Afterwards, having heard a lot about my lack of organization, confusion of thinking and absent-mindedness, the choice was made in favor of Logistics and Transport Management, from which I eventually left with the remaining sense of disgust for accounting and law.

And here I learn about Coursera , I look there and see such a freebie. Throwing away the old beliefs about their unsuitability and exclaiming: "And it all went!" - enrolled in the course "Learn to Program: The Fundamentals", which began last week. And soon for several other courses, + “Introduction to Computer Science I” on edX
In my first topic I want to write my impressions of the first two weeks of the course, and if anyone is interested -

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Actually, “Learn to Program: The Fundamentals” from the University of Toronto, the first such course that I started, and so far the only one (waiting for the rest of the rest). This course explains some basic concepts and principles on the example of Python.
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Course organization

The course lasts 7 weeks, at the beginning of each week 7 video lectures with a duration of up to 15 minutes are added. For most of the lectures attached ready summary, + subtitle files (which enthusiasts can translate and download). Some video lectures are sometimes interrupted and the student is given from one to several questions on the material just read by the lecturer - a feature that I wildly liked.

In addition to this, exercises are given for each week, they are quite simple - you need to answer multiple or single choice questions on the page, somewhere to answer an open question with a line of code, a phrase or a number. These exercises are awarded points, which are then taken into account in the final assessment of the student. Three exercises are given for each exercise and the questions do not change with a new attempt, so it’s hard not to get a good score for them.

Once every two weeks, a task is given, which must be done on your computer and load the finished result.

In the end - the exam. What he will be of himself - I myself do not know yet.

Rating system

On this course (I do not know yet how on others) each exercise and task has the number of points to be achieved. The grade for the exercise is 5% of the final grade, for the “homework” - 10% for the first and 15% for the next two. The final test is 25%. That is, for example, if I got 6 points out of 10 for the first exercise, that would be 3% of the final grade.

Bugs

Bugs were noticed that in the exercises the correct answer was actually not taken because of a space in the code line (which is allowed), for example:
the answer with spaces was not accepted

max(23, 95, 12) 

and without - quite

 max(23,95,12) 

Although it is permissible and so, and syk.

Small pleasures

My first homework, in which I needed to complete a set of functions according to these descriptions, examples of use and examples of exhaust after processing the arguments and determine some functions according to the description in the task, was attached with a .py file with Guy for the shit written by the student.


In addition, when a bug was discovered in an exercise, they gave an additional two attempts to this exercise. Thus, the total number of possible attempts has increased to 5.

Epilogue

Actually here. I am very glad that I came across Coursera and that I decided to spit and try. I really want to learn at least a little bit that I’m somehow interested and try to dig out with a game engine like Blender Game Engine (since we start Python) or jMonkeyEngine (if you teach Java later) in the near future. As Gagarin said, “Let's go!”

PS Thank you UFO for the invitation! And I apologize if I messed up with the choice of hubs - I still have to understand in a normal way where to publish and what not.