“But it all went!” Or again about Coursera and the like

Hello to the Khabrovites!

First of all, thank you, Habrovsk citizens! It was from you that I learned about such a wonderful project as Coursera.
Somehow, in the 10th grade, I decided that I wanted to enter one of Vienna's technical universities - I have been living in this city for quite some time. I had some very general understanding of what php, mySQL was, I heard about the existence of RoR from the bottom of my ear, and it seemed to me that web programming is extremely cool and that this is what I should do.

Subsequently, having heard about my disorganization, confusion of thinking and distraction, the choice was made in favor of Logistics and the Transport Department, where I eventually left with the remaining feeling of disgust for accounting and law.

And so I learn about CourseraI look in there and see such a freebie. Casting aside the old beliefs about his unsuitability and exclaiming: “And it went all!” - enrolled in the Learn to Program: The Fundamentals course, 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 (I'm waiting for the rest to start). This course explains some basic concepts and principles using the Python example.

Course organization

The course lasts 7 weeks, at the beginning of each week 7 video lectures are added with a duration of up to 15 minutes. Most lectures come with a compendium, + 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 that are quite simple - you need to answer multiple or single choice questions on a page, somewhere to answer an open question with a line of code, phrase or number. Points are awarded for these exercises, which are then taken into account in the student’s final grade. For each exercise, 3 attempts are given and the questions do not change with a new attempt, so it’s difficult not to get a good score for them.

Once every two weeks, a task is given that must be completed already on your computer and download the finished result.

At the end - an exam. What he will be like - I myself do not know yet.

Grading system

In this course (I do not know yet, as in others), each exercise and task has the number of points that must 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 received 6 points out of 10 for the first exercise, that would be 3% of the final grade.

Bugs

Bugs were noticed that the exercises did not accept the correct answer in fact because of the space code in the 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 both this and that.

Small pleasures

To my first homework, in which I needed to complete a set of functions according to the given descriptions, examples of use and examples of exhaust after processing the arguments and to determine some functions according to the description in the assignment, there was an .py file with a guy for the shit code written by the student .


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

Epilogue

Actually, here. I am very glad that I came across Coursera and that I nevertheless decided to spit and try. I really want to still learn at least a little of what is somehow interesting to me and try to dig deeper into a game engine like the Blender Game Engine (since we are starting with Python) or jMonkeyEngine (if you later learn Java). 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 properly understand where what can be published and what not.