What annoys you during online courses

Most online courses I’ve taken (university or MOOC) were not improvements over simply reading the textbook/source and doing the published exercises. I have taken a handful of online courses from “real universities” and they have all been atrociously bad. Some MOOCs I have taken have been much nicer (Ng’s Machine Learning stands out). Courses on platforms like Udemy seem to almost uniformly consist of regurgitated documentation. Maybe that’s helpful for someone (or they wouldn’t be so popular (?)), but I find video to be a slower and less dense form of info transmission.

The main thing I find annoying is that most of the courses I’ve tried don’t leverage the interactivity available to them. The exercises don't seem to have the right level of challenge to enable flow. In college, I took a linear algebra course with lectures on one day and group work on the other. On the second day, we’d have a difficult application problem of whatever we learned earlier in the week. We’d break into groups (small enough that you couldn’t hide) and work through the hard problem together. Each time, I’d leave the class feeling like I had truly gained a deep understanding of the subject matter.

In contrast, most online courses (if they have exercises at all) seem to be of the form: show pattern, change obvious detail, ask for obvious implementation. I haven’t found a lot of exercises that actually require a stretched understanding of the material to get through. Maybe this is optimized to mitigate huge drop off rates in MOOCs - easy problems keep people around longer. But, that doesn't really create a valuable learning experience.

The worst thing that one can experience is having to deal with a course with no media (videos, graphics, etc.). Plain text only. I had it once and it was awful.

Rather than what I do not like, how about what I like:

1) Videos that are about 15 minutes.

2) Being able to download the text of the video

3) Being able to download the power points

4) Pertinent exercises - with an optional video to show one solution

5) Good volume control - on first video I set my volume and I do not need to change it for each video - I know sounds trivial

6) Being able to skip back 15 seconds

7) I really like it when they have a 'Explore more' page with links to learn more indepth on the topic.

8) If it is a 'Read', then I prefer a PDF that is ideally even number of pages (to print both sides)

9) If it is a 'Read', then font size 12

10) All material that I might print, be organized with the idea that I would print it - no DOS windows of all black that will chew up all my ink

11) Nice feature would be a questions section

12) Easy to, at a glance, see where you left off the last time

it is a digitalized version of a college lecture is a terrible format in the first place. instead of taking the liberty of the internet and of the online world, it just brings the old methods that don't even work offline into the online world.

we need classes that helps us learn through collaboration, memorization, and practice. and I feel the internet can give us that. but Moocs and online classes do not.

The fact that it’s online to begin with.