#213 overall
Introduction to Artificial Intelligence
Stanford
2 recommenders · 2 threads · recommended in 1 year, 2011 · score 2.1
Stanford's introduction to artificial intelligence course, offered free online in 2011 by Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig, covering search, reasoning, and machine learning basics. Commenters tie it to Norvig's AI textbook.
Commenters call it a strong example of high-quality free online instruction from a top university, and one commenter says it pairs well with Norvig's textbook.
Machine Learning & AIintermediatefreevideo lectures#artificial intelligence#search#machine learning#norvig#thrun
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Bump. In the past, I've been through Stanford's IOS dev course and ML course (via iTunes). Currently, I'm doing the AI course. It is truly amazing that Stanford is giving away this content for free.
As an academic, it makes me wondering how education will change over the next 10 years. If a prof gives a fantastic lecture in the Fall of 2010, does he need to repeat himself in 2011? I had the experience of lecturing an undergrad course in Programming Languages many years ago. Honestly, the content didn't change much (I was teaching Scheme, ML and Prolog). I did get a bit better answering and anticipating student questions. I'll admit that in some cases, content must be updated fairly frequently. For instance, Prof. Ousterhaut's web app course on the site seems to be covering Rails 2.x.x. Teaching it today, perhaps 3.x or 3.1 would be used.
However, when I look at how well the community can improve the quality of a lecture, it blows my mind. In the Stanford AI class, for instance, the lecturer made a slight error where he defined the admissibility criteria of the h function (estimated cost) in A* search as less than the true cost rather than less than or equal to the true cost. Well ... this was quickly spotted by students and a correction was promptly issued. This blows my mind!
This also has the potential of making things worse on the supply side of education. In the last decade, it has undoubtedly gotten harder to get a faculty position in Computer Science. Will the advent of online education make that situation worse? As someone who has been an educator in the past, my personal opinion is that education should be available for free. But, I worry that it might not be sustainable.
I think 'never' is way too strong a statement. As mentioned in other comments 100+ student lectures are pretty much as impersonal, the only difference is you can rewind an online lecture, and usually have it taught by one of the best in the field.
Additionally I've supplemented poor university teachers with excellent online classes to much success. Personally I think the future of education should be something like students taking Stanford's ai class with local teachers acting as TAs and adding a few supplements + classroom interaction. You read Norvig's textbook, why not have him teach the material if you can?
Having taken far more than my fair share of classes, my experience is that, aside from project heavy courses, only upper level grad classes are really something you couldn't replace with a mass-audience, online course. And these are just training wheels for researching closely with a professor or research team anyway.
For lower to mid level undergraduate courses I actually feel that online classes (given that they are top tier classes) are better. A good teacher is much, much more important in earlier learning than later (a smart grad student should have no difficultly learning advanced material even with an awful teacher)
So? I failed to ascertain from the article why this is supposed to be some kind of problem.
Also, as far as I can see, quite a few people do find some reason to stay in, and fight for their grade. I've taken several online courses:
• The Norvig/Thrun AI class at Stanford
• Thrun's robot car class at Udacity
• Evans' applied cryptography class at Udacity
• Jackson and Shoham's game theory class at Coursera
• Ng's machine learning class at Coursera
• Abu-Mostafa's learning from data class at Caltech
At most of these, the forums were full of people who evidently found a reason to stay in. Whenever there was any ambiguity in a question, there would be spirited discussion and vigorous arguments from those who thought that the ambiguity had cost them a point.
There did tend to be more of this on Udacity courses than on Coursera courses. I think it because the Udacity forums are based on a Stack Exchange clone, whereas the Coursera forums are more like traditional forums.
On the other hand, the Caltech learning from data course had some good forum action, and its forums are quite plain and simple, so I don't think forum software explains the difference between Udacity and Coursera. Part of it might be that Abu-Mostafa frequently answers questions on the forum, whereas at Coursera I didn't see the professors on the forums much--only TAs.
If you need some kind of threat looming over you in order to motivate you to stick with a course and no such threat is available, why take that course? Go take some course in a subject that actually interests you enough that learning more about it is sufficient motivation.
I'm not sure if you're just trolling or if you have an actual critical comparison to make. Can you elaborate?
There are a number of things you could be referring to when you say the Stanford lectures are "way better". Which Stanford lectures are you talking about? The recent AI, DB and ML classes? The general Stanford open course stuff? Are you talking about the content, presentation, selection of material, structure of classes, file formats, editing, ... ?
I've watched a lot of the Stanford AI and DB lectures, and I've cherry picked from the other stuff. The list of courses here (http://www.extension.harvard.edu/open-learning-initiative) includes some things that aren't offered by Stanford, and based on 5 minutes of sampling, the video quality looks passable. Some of the Stanford open course videos are pretty terrible in video quality (check out the web applications one) altho the content seems very good. I can't speak to the content of the Harvard lectures without actually watching them. Have you?
While it would be great if Harvard started to offer structured online classes like the recent Stanford ones, it's pretty cool that these are available at all, given that Harvard is about as old-guard as you can get.