I took the Stanford AI class. Overall I’m very impressed with the scalability and quality of the experience. I’m tempted to check Thrum’s TA roles for Udacity! While I don’t think that *every* kind of class should be taught in this way, for technical material with clear “right answers”, this is the (a?) right approach.<\/p>\n
The class worked incredibly well overall despite a number of flaws. The best part was immediate feedback, on quiz materials and once the homework deadline had passed. When something is fresh in your mind, this is the real learning moment — so that’s invaluable for keeping student engagement. Even though so much of the class was rough at the edges, that, and a trust in the knowledge\/expertise of the instructors, is the key aspect that would drive me to take this sort of class again. I also went in expecting to learn more about online learning (having both taken and TA’d other online classes); I did not expect to have such a powerful experience of the potential of this (relatively impersonal) approach.<\/p>\n
“Education” means many things to many people. To the extent that education is about filling heads with core technical material, this is the future of education. In my mind, this pushes educators in several directions:<\/p>\n
Here are some pros and cons, off the top of my head:
\n+
\nMaterial was chunked into short segments.
\nThere were clear, regular assignments.
\nThere was an active community of students, discussing in many places.
\nDiscussion approaches improved over the course of the class (e.g. tagging questions to particular homework problems).
\nThere were attempts at engagement (e.g. “office hours” where questions were submitted via
\nThe students built tools for their own and others’ use; I relied heavily on the subtitling (much easier for skimming through the parts that I already understood).
\nThe material was well-chosen.
\nEminent instructors who know the field and are passionate about it.
\nThe feeling of being part of a game-changing educational endeavor.<\/p>\n
–
\nThe classes were very video-focused:
\n–Other learning modalities were not well accommodated.
\n–Watching required a lot of time and for AI, no inherent speed-up capabilities were built in.
\nFeedback was not personal.
\nThe schedule varied a bit more than necessary (DOS attacks, scalability issues, changes of plans)
\nRepetitive conversations in the online discussions made things hard to follow.
\nLack of engagement in some ways.
\nReliance on a number of external tools (e.g. google hangout for “office hours”, aiqus, reddit, …) made it difficult to keep up even with core discussion.
\nDifficulty inherent in the size of the class\/scalability (e.g. google docs couldn’t handle the number of editors for course notes)
\nAssignments were not proofread in advance
\nAssignments could have made better use of the particular kinds of typical mistakes (“insightful errors”)
\nClass communication could have used improvement — for instance, announcements didn’t use RSS and important corrections didn’t always get shared.
\nThere were two instructors with very different styles and pedagogical skills.
\nSome people complained about the “low tech” approach to videos — but I found it helped avoid sterility.
\nClass materials were sometimes not available at the moments when I had time.
\nSome material seemed simplistic.
\nMany students dropped out or lost interest (I haven’t seen statistics which were promised).<\/p>\n
+\/-
\nAssessment could be seen as varied or insufficient: several German testing centres were opened to allow students to prove their mettle in a timed environment.<\/p>\n
The Stanford online classes (AI<\/a> etc.) and Udacity<\/a> came up in a DERI<\/a> listserv discussion about the future of education. This is an answer to: “Care to share experience of the classes? How did it compare to a conventional lecture series? What were the pros and cons?”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I took the Stanford AI class. Overall I’m very impressed with the scalability and quality of the experience. I’m tempted to check Thrum’s TA roles for Udacity! While I don’t think that *every* kind of class should be taught in this way, for technical material with clear “right answers”, this is the (a?) right approach. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[99],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2170","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-higher-education"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jodischneider.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2170","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jodischneider.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jodischneider.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jodischneider.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jodischneider.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2170"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/jodischneider.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2170\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2173,"href":"https:\/\/jodischneider.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2170\/revisions\/2173"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jodischneider.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2170"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jodischneider.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2170"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jodischneider.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2170"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}