That course was great, though, and I definitely learned some things I'm glad to have learned!
IMO the instructional materials are a small part of the value. The things that stood out to me were:
- the assignments
- the autograding of programming assignments
- giving and receiving peer feedback about written assignments
- learning some LaTeX for those assignments
- having an artificial reason (course grade) to persist in improving my algorithm and code [on the problems taught in that course, I wouldn't have been self-motivated enough if they were just things I came across during a random weekend]
* My fellow classmates. Had a small study group where we got on Discord to hang out and it was a blast
* The TAs - they were so dedicated to the students and fantastic. MVPs of the program
I wasn't in any discord groups but the class discussion forum was a nice community.