Universities to recommend for online math/physics courses?

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Discussion Overview

The discussion centers around recommendations for high-quality online math and physics courses, as well as universities and platforms that offer such courses. Participants express interest in gathering a list of reputable sources for online education in STEM fields, including mathematics, physics, chemistry, and electrical engineering.

Discussion Character

  • Exploratory
  • Technical explanation
  • Debate/contested

Main Points Raised

  • One participant suggests creating a sticky thread for recommendations of high-quality online courses and platforms, mentioning their interest in math and other STEM subjects.
  • Another participant provides links to EdX, a consortium of universities, and highlights its course search functionality for math and physics.
  • A participant expresses a desire for specific recommendations on teachers and courses, noting the difficulty in searching for past recommendations on the forum.
  • One participant shares their positive impressions of three courses from the Moscow Higher School of Economics on Coursera, including topics like General Relativity and Galois Theory, while noting varying lecture quality.
  • A mentor mentions that students they guide have had positive experiences with specific Coursera courses, including Calculus, Astrophysics, and Python.

Areas of Agreement / Disagreement

Participants generally agree on the value of compiling recommendations for online courses, but there is no consensus on specific courses or platforms beyond those mentioned.

Contextual Notes

Some participants note the challenges in finding specific course recommendations due to varying terminology and the limitations of the forum's search functionality.

Who May Find This Useful

Individuals seeking high-quality online courses in mathematics, physics, chemistry, and electrical engineering, as well as those interested in recommendations for reputable educational platforms and instructors.

UsableThought
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I posted about a question about whether Coursera is still a good option for online courses, in the wake of their having downgraded their platform; but haven't gotten any replies: Teaching quality of Coursera math courses after platform re-design?

So here is a larger question that might succeed better: Could we maybe create a stickie with recommendations either for particular online courses of high quality, and/or universities or independent platforms that sponsor high-quaulity courses? I'm interested in math but recommendations for physics, chem, and EE courses would also be welcomed.

Stanford still has some independently run courses, apparently, e.g. there is Lagunita, which offers what looks like about 50 online courses at present, all running on the Open edX platform; putting aside humanities courses, the science courses look to be in medical/biological, computer science, logic & language, and statistics. Duke has Duke Extend which looks pretty sparse at the moment, with only a handful of courses, including one in astronomy and one on Linux.

I haven't gotten farther than that but will probably be doing some more exploring in the future. At any rate I think listings of quality online courses, instructors, and programs/schools might be a useful resource if there is enough knowledge that such a stickie thread could be created. It would get dated; but hopefully the recommendations would be general enough to help people look in the right places.
 
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UsableThought said:
So here is a larger question that might succeed better: Could we maybe create a stickie with recommendations either for particular online courses of high quality, and/or universities or independent platforms that sponsor high-quaulity courses? I'm interested in math but recommendations for physics, chem, and EE courses would also be welcomed.
Hi UsableThought:

Ed X is a consortium of universities. Their main website page is
Near the bottom of this page is a "FIND COURSES" button.

Here are links for math and physics.

Hope this is helpful.

Regards,
Buzz
 
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Buzz Bloom said:
Near the bottom of this page is a "FIND COURSES" button.

Thanks. I am also hoping that people will be able to recommend specific teachers or specific courses; as well as universities/institutions that are known for developing good courses. Search is helpful; so are recommendations.

I know that here & there in specific threads on this forum, people have made these sorts of recommendations; however it's not so easy to search the archives of this forum to pull those recommendations up, as the descriptive words & thus the search terms are likely to vary quite a bit.
 
I have been impressed by the following three courses offered by the Moscow Higher School of Economics via Coursera:
- Introduction into General Theory of Relativity https://www.coursera.org/learn/general-relativity/home/welcome
- Jacobi modular forms https://www.coursera.org/learn/modular-forms-jacobi
- Introduction to Galois Theory https://www.coursera.org/learn/galois (the quality of lectures is not as good as in the other courses)

This gem of a course - Effective Field Theory by Prof. Iain Stewart from MIT https://courses.edx.org/courses/MITx/8.EFTx/3T2014/info - has just started its second presentation on EdX. It does not run regularly.
 
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Students I mentor have had uniformly positive experiences with Coursera, including Calculus One (Ohio St), Astrophysics (Duke), and Python (Rice).
 
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