MITx supplies a textbook which is very nice. A Jeff Kent hacked together a scrolling textbook viewer as well. MITx needs a bit more moderating on the discussion boards. Many people are going to fail the class when they find out that there is more to the class than finding the answer in the forums.
MITx suffers a bit from small assignments and small exercise sets. They've compensated for the shortcoming already by adding tutorials. (I didn't notice them when I first took a gander - I think they were added.) The textbook also counters this deficit.
The first assignment for 6.002x was due last weekend but they take the best 10 out of 12, so it's still worthwhile to sign up!
Coursera's offerings are also nice. One of the features that was there that is no longer working for me is increased video playback speed. The +/- buttons do not work. Playing video at ~1.4x was quite nice. MITx can play at 1.25x and 1.5x. Dr. Aggarwal's (MIT) Hindi-Bostonian accent at 1.5x chipmunk speeds is a bit too much for my brain to process, but at 1.25x he seems even more excited about his teaching!
I'm also having issues with the video crashing or hanging with Coursera. To counteract that I am taking advantage of downloading the videos and using VLC to chipmunk them. Coursera is more portable. But in both cases students have hacked together downloaders for the entire course anyway.
And as always, check how you are evaluated. Just like a real course, the way you are evaluated changes from course to course.
I'm really enjoying the Natural Language Processing. The first assignment is due on Sunday I think.
Other than the SaaS and Model Thinking class, everything else is still just starting or hasn't started yet. I am going through the Model Thinking videos course even though I registered way too late. Really really worth it.
My TL; DR: I narrowly prefer the MITx setup over Coursera.
Coursera, I'm doing the NLP class but it is just a guy writing equations on a chalkboard. The class would be much better if he used plain english to explain his equations instead of reading off the slide.
MITx, I gave up on the electronics course because I can't read the guys handwriting and I didn't like the labs. The book is also in the worst format I've ever seen but at least it's free.
> Coursera, I'm doing the NLP class but it is just a guy writing equations on a chalkboard
I'm doing the NLP class too. The professors go through the material pretty rapidly and sometimes you have to fill in some gaps yourself, but "just a guy writing equations on a chalkboard" isn't an accurate description.
