As someone who has spent an embarrassing amount of time on various independent education, one of the key things I've taken from it is just how efficient text books are. Not only can you read more quickly than people can speak, but it's also active by nature. I've often found my attention wandering during videos, but it's just not possible to read without putting in a minimum amount of focus. It's also a lot easier to modulate your reading speed based on how easy material is for you than it is to do the same during a lecture video.
Some general thoughts on MOOCs:
Coursera and edX tend to be great for small, self-contained topics and the automated graders for programming assignments is great as well. The forums are also useful, though not ideal (since there are no practice questions students can get help with that don't fall under the honor code).
Where modern MOOCs really fall down is prerequisites. It's surprisingly difficult to do something like structure an entire CS degree from Coursera classes. Though many classes are taught by famous CS professors, they are from different institutions that break material into courses in different ways. Worse still a lot of the classes are either watered-down or shortened or both.
MIT's Open Courseware archives are actually a lot better for this. There are no certificates, and no credentials, but nearly all the material is freely available. The one biggest inefficiency though, is all the time spent in the lectures. At least they can be played back at a higher speed, but the lectures really do take a lot more time and cover less than the textbooks. For courses that have good textbooks, I think the best approach is to skip the lectures except in portions where you feel like you need more review.
Finally Khan Academy is fantastic for answering specific, mechanical questions (e.g. how to calculate eigen values), but a bit light on material. I'd use it as a supplement for the other resources.
I tend to watch lectures at 2x or 1.75x speed, and I tone it down for more difficult stuff, or pause, or rewatch. I think at 2x it's pretty even with how fast I can read, maybe even a bit faster. Modulating it isn't perfect but it's workable. Also, I struggle very hard to pay attention to almost any lecturer, my mind drifts very quickly and takes a while before I realize it's drifted. But at 2x I find my ADD is mostly defeated.
I also watch at 2x speed. I do the same for audiobooks. Your brain adapts. Sometimes I play them in 1x speed just for a bit and it sounds like extreme slow motion, and I think, people really listen to this?
I think coursera actually started tackling the issue by offering "specializations", i.e. the "Data Science" specialization[0] is a set of 9 small classes which should in the end provide the student with the tools needed to be a "junior number hacker" or something like that.
It's not a full CS curriculum, but I'd think vertical narrow "mini curricula" may be good enough.
As someone who has spent an embarrassing amount of time on various independent education, one of the key things I've taken from it is just how efficient text books are. Not only can you read more quickly than people can speak, but it's also active by nature. I've often found my attention wandering during videos, but it's just not possible to read without putting in a minimum amount of focus. It's also a lot easier to modulate your reading speed based on how easy material is for you than it is to do the same during a lecture video.
Some general thoughts on MOOCs:
Coursera and edX tend to be great for small, self-contained topics and the automated graders for programming assignments is great as well. The forums are also useful, though not ideal (since there are no practice questions students can get help with that don't fall under the honor code).
Where modern MOOCs really fall down is prerequisites. It's surprisingly difficult to do something like structure an entire CS degree from Coursera classes. Though many classes are taught by famous CS professors, they are from different institutions that break material into courses in different ways. Worse still a lot of the classes are either watered-down or shortened or both.
MIT's Open Courseware archives are actually a lot better for this. There are no certificates, and no credentials, but nearly all the material is freely available. The one biggest inefficiency though, is all the time spent in the lectures. At least they can be played back at a higher speed, but the lectures really do take a lot more time and cover less than the textbooks. For courses that have good textbooks, I think the best approach is to skip the lectures except in portions where you feel like you need more review.
Finally Khan Academy is fantastic for answering specific, mechanical questions (e.g. how to calculate eigen values), but a bit light on material. I'd use it as a supplement for the other resources.