It happens that a person graduated from a not a bad university, works for himself without any problems, but something new and unknown constantly appears around him and he wants to keep up ... And sometimes, a student feels that there is something wrong with his university, they teach something wrong and somehow scary for their fate - you will go either to the labor exchange, or to a bright IT future... It would seem, what is the problem ?! Engage in self-education - the network is full of resources. However, I would like to get everything in one place, with some kind of quality guarantee (there is not enough free time anyway). Therefore, I tried to study for free on a number of Russian training platforms. It turned out that everything is rather sad with IT topics there - there are a lot of useless materials, empty promises, inconveniences and outright hack. "Expose the lies ...". In this article, I want to share my subjective impressions of my experience of taking a number of free IT courses on Russian training platforms for about 1 year. I will write about Skillfactory , Opened education (openedu), GeekBrains and Stepik... At the end I will summarize briefly. I invite interested readers to discuss the article and their online learning experience in the comments.
Disclaimer . I am not associated with any of the listed platforms and have not been associated with any relationship, except for free training. The article is not intended to offend anyone, cause financial damage, condemn someone's choice, call for a choice of something, and also inflate holivar and other butthirt. If someone decides that this is another "plaintive" article, then I suggest paying attention to the first word of the title and to the epigraph.
1. Skillfactory
The Skillfactory platform (hereinafter referred to as SF) is designed to provide paid educational services. 147 courses are offered in Russian at https://lms.skillfactory.ru/courses . Other free materials are available at https://skillfactory.ru/events . They did not interest me.
Of the SF courses, only one is free : The Open Python Course .
As described on the site, this course allows you to master Python for data analysis from scratch. Further, all conclusions about SF are made from the experience of completing the specified course.
The course includes the following topics: Python; Pandas; data visualization; NumPy; HTML pages and API VKontakte; classes and OOP; databases - i.e. quite a lot of useful topics in one place. I liked the course in general, especially Pandas, NumPy and visualization.
The course consists of text materials and several videos. I recommend not watching these videos - everything is very long. Enough texts.
At the very beginning of the course, it is indicated that communication for the course will take place in Slack (hereinafter Slack). In fact, communication is carried out only by the students on the course - the SF team itself does not answer questions and comments about the course either in Slack or on the website.
The SF testing system is flawed - the main problem is that not all correct answers are accepted (this is basically what Slack is talking about) - it seems that the authors provide only a very limited set of correct answers. There are no deadlines for the course. No certificate is issued. Therefore, if you need at least some evidence of the successful completion of this course, then it remains to be content with a screenshot.
Because this is the only free course passed on the platform, then I did not try to quit it and I can not say anything about the ease of the procedure. With GeekBrains, for example, this is impossible without a request for support - the course will remain in your personal account - more about this is described below.
2. Open education
The Open Education Platform (hereinafter OE) is designed to provide “ free ” educational services (I will explain why “free” in quotation marks later). I have not seen paid courses there. At https://openedu.ru/ , 601 courses are offered in Russian in various areas of training (not only computer science - see screenshot). Filters for choosing courses of interest are inconvenient - you need to select the code of the direction of study , if you know. Therefore, it is difficult to understand how many IT courses are on this platform. It's easier to periodically review new courses and sign up for interesting ones. Almost all courses have a time interval when you can enroll in a course. Don't have time - wait for next year (semester or other date).
OO courses are prepared by the departments of various (not only capital) universities.
Learning to do something on your own, having completed only the appropriate course on the OO platform, will not work, because the course corresponds to the lectures at the university, but there are no seminars corresponding to them: they will not teach to solve problems here. I could not find a rating of courses based on OO reviews - I have to navigate by the name of the course itself and the university. As it turned out, the university does not play a role: everything is the same for everyone. The nice thing is that the courses were recorded by professional lecturers, so there are practically no "hums", pauses, repetitions. However, almost all courses are made in the style of "talking head" - the lecturer utters the text of the lecture monotonously - an example of such a course is https://openedu.ru/course/spbstu/BIGDATA/ .
Some courses in the same form are placed on different platforms without changes, for example, St. Petersburg State University has placed its course on databases on OO, on Stepik, and on Coursera, respectively: https://openedu.ru/course / spbu / DTBS / , https://stepik.org/course/2614/promo and https://www.coursera.org/learn/data-bases-intr . The quality did not increase from this - the course grade at Step 3.8 and 4.1 on Coursera. On the OO itself, it is impossible to find out the opinions of students about the courses. Here are some reviews from Stepik and Coursera: “ The course is very difficult to understand, simple things are explained in complex language ”; " The course discourages the desire to study DB "; "Test assignments are typical for Russian universities: in the lecture, an insignificant fact is mentioned, and then you are asked to remember it verbatim, for example, the year in which the event occurred ”; "There are inaccuracies in the course, in particular with explanations and slides in some videos ."
Communication on issues on the OO platform is conducted with the team of the university that developed the course. The answers are given by students, and not by the teacher who teaches the course, so the quality of the answers is often not satisfying: “...in one case, when choosing certain answers, the system counted them as correct, in the other case as incorrect. How so ?? - It was a mistake on our part ... We apologize - I corresponded with the course employee by e-mail - they can no longer correct anything. Ugly accompaniment of the course ”(the correspondence is not mine, but I agree with the assessment). Answers are sometimes delayed; some questions are not answered at all. Example: " ... From the video with the practice, the formulas that were used to test the hypothesis by the A / B test are not clear ...". At the time of this writing, there is no answer, but 3 months have passed .
The testing system is primitive - in the vast majority of courses, you can only mark the correct answer options with radio buttons or checkboxes. I noticed a more advanced verification system in ITMO courses - there the code is run on a set of tests, but this system is loaded via an external link and is extremely laconic - either the problem is solved (100%), or the problem is not solved (0%).
Almost all courses have deadlines, both on individual topics and for the entire course. For this OO platform is a fat minus. A certificate of completion of the course is provided only for money - 1800 rubles with a separate exam under video control - this is the question of "free". Another disadvantage. They write that the certificate can be credited to your university. If you don't want to pay for the certificate, then again we take a screenshot for memory. Interestingly, the screenshot will look almost the same as the Skillfactory (compare with the screenshot in the SF section) - except for the title, of course. Who copied from whom ... or some other variation?
The last homework assignment (HW12 in the screenshot) for the course "Introduction to AI" from the Higher School of Economics was: write an essay "Is it possible to consider the imposition of styles and the generation of images as creativity and can neural networks become a new trend in art?" Here is a discussion of this assignment. I did not notice any delight.
As you may have noticed from the screenshot, I didn’t do the essay. I believe that such a task could be useful only for future journalists writing about IT topics. It seems that OO does not control course content. By the way, I wonder who will be checking these essays? Student volunteers?
If you don't like the OO course, then it is easy to quit and you will no longer see it in your personal account. However, it will appear in the course catalog.
3. GeekBrains
It's not free. And this is free.
The GeekBrains platform (hereinafter GB) is designed to provide paid educational services. At https://geekbrains.ru/10 free IT courses and 17 intensive courses are offered in Russian. You can also watch a lot for free (they promise 1197 - I didn't count) webinars and pass a number of tests. The tests themselves are tailored for the courses taught in GB, so they come across dubious questions, for example, "what is the value of the expression 0 or () or []" about Python. The usefulness of such "intimate" knowledge is questionable. If someone uses similar code in real life, please share examples in the discussion. I got the impression that these tests are also exams for some courses: I passed the Python test, for example, then I decided to watch the course on it - I was looking, and I had already passed the final exam for the course and I was awarded some points for the course. The points themselves, by the way, are completely useless:they cannot be spent on something and they are not displayed in the certificate for the test.
On the main page of the GB platform, they lure with discounts - they immediately give 40%. It seemed that all the free materials on this platform are advertising, to promote paid courses. This can also be seen from the content of free intensives and webinars - at the beginning it will be about GB and how cool it is, and at the end it will be necessary to talk about the possibilities and advantages of paid education on this platform - maybe 10 minutes. With guaranteed employment (this is written in the GB course catalog - see screenshot), which seems to mean receiving one offer with an unspecified payment to GB.
However, here ( https://habr.com/ru/company/ozontech/blog/512026/ ) you can find out that “Alexander Skudarnov, EdProduct of the“ Programming ”direction of the educational portal GeekBrains, began by saying that no one is guaranteed employment. will give ". "Expose the lies ..." There are
filters for choosing courses on the GB platform. The level of free courses is about the same - for very beginners (SF's Python course was also for beginners, but much more meaningful). After each lesson, they offer to leave a review about it for quality control, i.e. other students will not see your review.
The quality of the lecturers is very different - some teach the lesson very vividly and the set out does not cause protest; others can only be listened to at a speed of 1.25x or faster, otherwise you will fall asleep, and you should be skeptical about what they say. I learned from one of these lecturers that in databases, to bring a table into the third normal form (3NF), all duplicate values (for example, the name of the manufacturer) must be replaced with references to the rows of the new table of manufacturers. Not a word was said about checking for transitivity ( https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_normal_form ). By the way, this course has already become paid - the cost is 5500 rubles.
GB technical support answers questions quickly. The shortcomings in the courses are promised to be corrected - I have not tested it. There is a control over the work of technical support - after contacting, they send a letter with a request to evaluate the answer. I also wrote to them about the situation with 3NF - they replied that "well, he probably said how they do in practice." Will such an answer about 3NF be satisfied at some interview ... “that's the question” (c).
Similar to the Open Education platform, the GB testing system is primitive - the choice of options by radio buttons or checkboxes. The main emphasis is on peer review of each other's decisions, which is annoying. Especially if you paid GB money. I believe that the GB platform was simply too lazy to make a verification system ... and saved money. And trusting the verification of assignments to beginners (and who else will take the course) is a dubious idea.
GB courses have deadlines for homework assignments and for the entire course. Regardless of the results shown on the course, they will give a certificate of completion. With tests, everything is more complicated - there is a minimum threshold for passing: before the beginning of the passage, both the time for the test and the minimum passing score are displayed, but the score is not visible in the certificate.
They do not skimp on certificates in GB (during the quarantine period I received a total of about 30 certificates) - they are given them free of charge for intensive courses, courses, and tests. It's nice. It is possible both in English and in Russian - sample below. The value of such a certificate can be discussed.
If you don't like the course, then you can leave it (so that it is not displayed in your personal account) only by contacting technical support. However, it will appear in the course catalog.
4. Stepik
The platform is designed to provide educational services. A list of courses in various subjects is available at https://stepik.org/catalog . The number of courses is 700. The courses are mostly free, but there are also paid ones (22 pieces). In the course catalog, in addition to the name and authorship, the following are displayed: the number of people enrolled in the course, its cost, compliance with the Stapik criteria and the average review score. I have a lot of questions about the Stapik criteria and the average mark - see below. The certificate for the course is not displayed in the catalog.
There are filters for courses, but it's easier to periodically view new courses and sign up for interesting ones. The level of the courses is different - there are both for beginners and more advanced ones, for example, in algorithmsfrom Computer Science Center. After completing 80% of the course, Stepik offers to leave a review about it. The offer is quite intrusive - if you refused once, then it will be repeated later. It happens that an offer to leave a review is received, even if a review has already been left. In this case, when you try to save a new review, an uninformative error message will appear.
You can try to communicate with the team that developed the course, but this is not guaranteed by the platform and depends on the wishes of the authors. Therefore, a number of errors and misprints are never corrected. Stepik himself will not correct them either - it has been checked personally.
Formally there is technical support from Stepik himself, it is available by e-mail. But I could not solve a single issue through it - neither about the work of the platform itself, nor about the courses. The impression remains that the main task of support is to tire the user so that he stops the correspondence, because he will understand that the correspondence will not give him anything. It is possible that this is a difference in mentality or my high expectations from Stepik's team. In order not to look unfounded, I will describe several examples of correspondence.
1. Long work of the checking system : a linear program in Kotlin of 5 lines is checked on the Stepik website for 20-30 seconds. Why so long? Is there anything you can do? Answer: the response time depends on the server load.
Formally, everything is correct, but the sediment remains ... I would like the technical support to feel the inconvenience experienced by the users and would suggest making, for example, a more informative message about the wait (about its reasons).
2. Incorrect work of the site : the elements of the page of the verification system are displayed with a delay - first, the inscription "You got 1 point out of 1" appears, and after a couple of seconds (or longer) the rest of the page elements are loaded - see the screenshot below. Answer: This is normal interface behavior. Record your screencast.
And if the user, for example, does not know how to make a screencast? I used to think that it is a support responsibility to try to reproduce the issue.
3. Incorrect display of the course : in the course about Chesspictures, including positions on the chessboard, are not displayed, so test tasks cannot be completed. Answer: we wrote a letter to the author of the course, but we cannot do anything else, because we are not responsible for the course, but only provide a platform.
It turns out that after posting on Stepik, no one is responsible for the course. Even in the case of its incorrect display and the impossibility of passing.
I saved a screenshot of one such correspondence:
For example, this program ( https://stepik.org/lesson/67625/step/3 ) is checked for 20-30 seconds, after which an inscription appears about the points received. Then, after another couple or five seconds, the inscription "Checking ..." will disappear, and only then will congratulations and a convenient button for going to the next task appear. It is not clear why this additional expectation arises.
There is also a funny moment. Sometimes course authors use the Stepik checker to collect statistics such as "Would you recommend this course?" Regardless of the choice of the answer, for example, "No", an inscription appears like "Well done! Everything is correct. "
There is no quality control of the course by Stepik - everything is assigned to the author's conscientiousness. If he does not want to correct the mistake, then the course will remain in its original form - see the correspondence fragment above. Therefore, when taking a course on Stepik, do not be surprised if some errors are not corrected for 5 years - an example is the same course on algorithms from the Computer Science Center. Proposals for improving the service, for example, mandatory entrance control of the course or blocking the course with low grades of its constituent parts (so-called steps), support is also not accepted - they say, thanks, but we have our own vision at Stepik.
It happens that universities are hacky and place not specially recorded lectures for the course, but a cut of low-quality video from the audience, for example, https://stepik.org/course/65388(average grade of the course 4.4, 5318 students). You can “enjoy” the lecturer's conversations with the audience or see how the lecturer goes out of frame and there, apparently, draws something with a marker on the board. What exactly, you can only guess from the audio. For some reason, some of the videos in this course from MIPT are recorded in a mirror image - the letters on the slides go from right to left. Well, Stepik again has nothing to do with it.
Not surprisingly, the quality of the courses on the platform is very diverse: neither the number of students, nor the Stapik criteria, nor the average grade guarantee quality. Example: the course "Neural Networks and Text Processing" from Samsung - 12 731 students, average grade 4.8. Everything seems to be good. And 59 people were able to solve the final problem ( https://stepik.org/lesson/261085/step/10?unit=241829). Can such a course be called quality?
In order to answer possible questions in advance: I enter these 59 people, the result at the rate of 86% is my worst result on the Stepik (another course from Samsung - my first course on Stepik - 97%, the rest 100% each. Excellent student, Ja ... Ja):
In the same course, the authors gave very poor answers (more often no than yes) to questions and comments. The answers were often useless: why did they do it like this - " well, they did it that way ." The course itself is crude: there are a lot of typos, inaccuracies ... Why was it posted in this form, without checking? A "funny" example: one run of a neural network from the course authors at some seminars takes 1 hour (on their equipment). Listeners are advised to use cloud computing in Google Colaba, where the calculations take 2.5 times longer, respectively. As a task, the authors propose to select hyperparameters, which implies running the training several times. And this is a common task on the course for 1 point! Overall, I gave the authors a grade of 1 for this course.
I noticed that in positive reviews of Stepik's courses, students often emphasize that they acquired some knowledge for free. In my opinion, this is not enough for a positive assessment of the course. It happens that the lecturer is not a professional - “hums”, stutters, bent down and writes on the tablet in front of him (I came across this in the course on Algorithms ). And there are complaints about assignments - it takes longer to understand what the authors want from you than to decide. And the examples from the video do not play, i.e. the authors of the course posted the code, showed the results of its work, ... and these results are different for the students, and it was not possible to find at least someone whose author's code worked without changes ( https://stepik.org/course/54098) - all the same course from Samsung. This is all about the issue of the lack of verification of the course by Stepik when it is accepted on the platform, because the authors think that everything is fine with them and therefore they often react aggressively to comments (more often they do not react at all), but in reality everything is sad. Evaluation criteria for the course are also discussed.
Let's go back to the platform. Stepik's testing system is capable of checking the program code - several variants of the correct answer are allowed. Information about which test failed is not displayed, so students exchange examples of tests themselves in the comments. Overall, this is the best educational platform we've reviewed here. If we could also remove the "inhibition", it would be quite good. For Kotlin, for example, I can refer to https://play.kotlinlang.org/- there the reaction is almost instantaneous. And taking into account the fact that Stepik is a “product” of JetBrains ( https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stepik ), it’s somehow even strange why they didn’t turn to the “parent” for help. By the way, when actively solving Python problems, for example, Stepik offers free licenses for JetBrains products, incl. “Family” ties are still in effect.
Some courses at Stepic have deadlines. After them, points for correct answers are not awarded. More precisely, after a soft deadline, half a point is awarded, after a hard deadline, nothing is awarded. Certificates are available both ordinary (approximately 70-80% of correct answers - depending on the author of the course) and with honors (approximately 90% of correct answers). Not all courses are certified. The certificate displays the username entered in the personal account. The value of Stepik's certificates is not known to me.
If you do not like the course, then you can leave it at Stepik at any time without contacting support. However, it will appear in the course catalog.
conclusions
- The desire to learn something for free in Russian is quite doable. Several educational platforms are available.
- . : .
- (SF, GB) , , . GB . , . «» … .
- : , – . , – , , ? , 1800 , .
- Of the courses tested, one Stepik remains. The disadvantage of the second point is inherent in him. In technical support, it seems like one person is sitting, but there is no sense from him (more precisely from her). However, at Stepik, there are courses with a large number of practical tasks, including quite difficult ones (sometimes too much). Therefore, I recommend looking for knowledge here, without expecting a particularly high-quality service, of course - for free.
Well, at the very end of the article, I want to invite readers to discuss the following proposals for improving the quality of courses. On Stapik especially, given my recommendation for choosing a platform.
- , .. – , , – . . .
- .
- – . , – ( «», ). .
- . .
- , 1 , , 1 . .
- , , .
- .
- , , . .
- , , . 4.0, , 8.
- Students should be able to block the display of the course in the catalog for themselves - for example, if they don't like the course or have already completed it.
If this post arouses interest, I will write a sequel about non-Russian platforms, free, of course.