Thoughts on Stanford's Online Courses

Last year I enrolled in a couple of the extremely popular Stanford online classes: Intro to AI and Machine Learning. While many other people who took the courses also wrote on the topic I feel like none of the descriptions quite matched how I feel about the courses, so I think I will talk about them a little bit here.

First, the good things:

• The connection - I feel like in a course like this you have a much closer connection to the professor than you do in recorded videos like the MIT OpenCourseWare lectures or even a real classroom (with the exception of smaller class sizes) since the professor is talking directly to the camera or the camera is filming some sort of drawing surface. The professors were all extremely passionate about their topics and talked about them with so much enthusiasm (especially Sebastian Thrun) that I couldn't help but feel more enthusiastic about the topics as well - although I didn't really need the help, I found the courses very interesting! Despite the fact that in reality the video method of teaching is extremely impersonal, it seems much more personal because it is like a one-on-one enviroment where the professor is talking just to you instead of an entire classroom. Most of the time this makes you feel like you have to pay attention! Compare this to a class of 100+ students where if you fall asleep, zone out, or start doodling it's not likely the professor will notice or care.


• The flexibility - Picture scenario one: you're sitting in your living room in a comfy chair covered in a warm blanket sipping delicious beer. You're watching the online videos on your laptop while occasionally pausing the video to go get a snack, do some chores, or check on dinner.
  Now picture scenario two: you're sitting in a hard plastic chair in a windowless room dimly lit by the projection of PowerPoint slides onto the wall (you've all had a class like that, don't lie) at 8am in the morning. Some guy is chewing loudly in the seat behind you while someone, somewhere is rapidly tapping their pen against the desk.
  Which enviroment would you prefer? While these are two extreme examples, personally I would prefer the former.
• The technology - I found the websites modern and very easy to navigate with no clutter distracting you from what you were looking for. The two main hiccups that I noticed with the technology:
  • With the AI class the videos wouldn't always skip ahead to the next video or to the quiz - probably because I was watching the videos under Linux. The first time it happened it took a little while to realize that you could click on the question mark to access the quiz.
  • With the ML class the video would appear on a "pop-up" div inside the window and the background would fade out, but if you clicked on the background it would close the video. This was annoying when you flip to another window but then click on the browser to re-focus it and end up killing the video.
  These aren't huge problems, just little bugs or UI quirks that are expected with new software. I really enjoyed the submission system for the ML class where you could submit your assignments directly from within Octave by typing submit. I've had some programming classes do this type of thing and it really makes it easy to get your work done.

Some things I found so-so:

• The content - I'm going to be a little harsh. The content was very interesting for both courses, however I found myself disappointed with the depth of the knowledge. It seemed like we were only scratching the surface of the topics without going into the detail or rigour that I would expect from a full university course. Then again, this is an introductory course and it has been a long time since I took an introductory course to anything. Maybe I'm just biased.

Inevitably, the downsides:

• The assignments - I'm a person that learns by doing. I can see the things in the lecture and understand them fully, but everything tends to go in one ear and right out the other. When it comes to applying the concepts learned in the lecture I need to do it myself before the material really sinks in. In the AI class I found that the only assignment/quiz that I really connected with was the optional assignment for a simple decryption problem using NLP and statistics that was presented at the very end of the course. The rest of the assignments were just quizzes and while you do learn something by having to answer questions, I felt that the learning wasn't quite as deep on these topics as it could have been if we were actually supposed to program something.
  With the ML class they actually did have programming assignments in addition to quizzes, however with those I found that most of the time all you really had to do was translate the equations from the ones written in the assignment description to Octave and it would work. You weren't really learning and understanding what was going on, you were essentially just copying and pasting. I feel like I would have learned a lot more if the assignments had a bit more challenge to them.
• Lack of interaction - Some of my favourite classes involved a good deal of interaction between the professor and/or the other members of the class (seminar or lab classes come to mind). In these types of classes the interaction component is a huge benefit to learning compared to the StackOverflow-style Q&A forums that they had for the AI class. Because of the online nature of the courses, there isn't really a solution to this problem that I'm aware of.

I will most certainly continue to spend free time taking these online classes, unfortunately there are too many courses that I would like to take and not enough time to take them (I had this same problem back when I was in university). One thing that would be great to see is a Khan Academy style approach where you can take the class whenever you want instead of just during the semesters that they are offered.

In the very unlikely chance that any of the Stanford profs read this, thanks! I really have enjoyed the classes and will continue taking them for a long time yet.