When comparing The New Boston video series vs edX, the Slant community recommends edX for most people. In the question“What are the best educational websites?” edX is ranked 2nd while The New Boston video series is ranked 5th. The most important reason people chose edX is:
Both edX and the classes are free.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Everything is free
The tutorials are completely free.
Pro Video tutorials
Tutorials are presented as videos, making them easy to follow / see what's going on at each step. Many people find this format less daunting and easier to take in than traditional text based tutorials.
Pro Suitable for beginners
No assumptions are made about prior knowledge, meaning anyone can start watching and pick up the basics fairly quickly.
Pro More than 200 video lessons
Pro Free
Both edX and the classes are free.
Pro Offers courses from well known schools
edX offers courses from a wide range of well known colleges and universities including Harvard, MIT, UC Berkeley, Cornell and more.
Pro Large selection of science courses
edX offers a wide variety of science-related courses. This makes it a great resource for learning not only specific programming languages, but also other topics relating to computer science.
Pro A lot of topics (subjects)
Topics include biology, business, chemistry, computer science, economics, finance, electronics, engineering, food and nutrition, history, humanities, law, literature, math, medicine, music, philosophy, physics, science, statistics and more.
Pro Offer certificates for some courses
Cons
Con Somewhat outdated
These videos are a few years old (2011), so there is some content that is a bit outdated.
Con Lack of engagement in the forums
edX does not have the same forum participation from both students and instructors that other websites do, and the form of engagement often does not encourage discussion.
Con Courses aren't always available
While edX does offer some self-paced courses, you may end up waiting for the course of your choice to be run.
Con The forums are difficult to navigate
The forums are difficult to sort by date and topic, and are unintuitive to navigate.
