Slashdot Mirror
More Stanford Computing Courses Go Free
mikejuk writes "Following on the recent Slashdot item on the availability of a free Stanford AI course there is news that two other Stanford Computer Science courses are also joining in this 'bold experiment in distributed education' in which students not only have access to lecture videos and other course materials but will actively participate by submitting assignments and getting regular feedback on their progress. The subjects are Machine Learning with Andrew Ng and Database with Jennifer Widom. This open approach looks as if it might be a success with well over 100,000 prospective students signing up to the AI course alone."
Is that sarcasm? I can't tell. Textbooks are not really required, and many of the course notes are available online.
Online education is ok, but there's no substitute for being able to ask questions in realtime and address issues with an actual teacher.
If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits
95 000 of the participants are AI.
Nah, just download a dodgy etextbook
That pesky penguin is still in my computer, I refuse to let the poor little thing out.
Does that mean each of the 100 000 learn one little bit and colectivly they are clever and know AI.
That pesky penguin is still in my computer, I refuse to let the poor little thing out.
Currently just under 30,000 signed up. Let's see what the Slashdot effect does.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
That is, how many of those tens of thousands who have signed up have what it takes to complete the courses? Do they have the necessary background, determination and aptitude to do it? I think some may have bitten off more than they can chew. I wouldn't be surprised if more than 50% drop out eventually.
All those kids with the One Laptop Per Child computers will be up there learning CS and programming. Millions of programmers and computer scientists will be created. Now all those Third World countries wanting to modernize and enter the WTO so they can increase their standard of living, will have plenty of tech people to dump into the market. Supply and Demand being what is, you know what will happen.
But it gets worse. As those countries compete in trying to be the next India, tech labor will go to zero. Can it go further down? Yep. Those same countries will start paying large multinational corporations to use their tech people. The goal? The policy makers will hope and pray that if they get enough high tech multinationals in their country, they will hit a tipping point and others will set up shop in their countries and they too will have a high-tech boom.
What they fail to understand, the multinationals will suck them dry in order to enrich their CEOs. Some of the well connected people in those countries will get rich but the rest of the people will get screwed and so will we - yes, we have a ways to go in our decline. Sure, some of us will get a few crumbs as our hundred shares or so of their stock goes up a few bucks but tell me, the increase in your pathetic little 401K compensates you for your loss of job? I had to cash mine in to keep a roof over my head and eat.
American Dream my ass! American nightmare!
I think it would be bad business to spend time and money educating a person just to have them buy the degree from somewhere else.
The person giving the course *wrote* the textbook.
[FUCK BETA]
Go to ml-class.org to sign up for the machine learning class, and db-class.org for the databases class!
That is sarcasm. As a seasoned victim of textbook companies, I can promise you that textbook companies view anything like this as the development of open-source competition. Even courses that they don't sell books for are a problem, since every course adds momentum to the open courseware movement.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
I think it would be bad business to spend time and money educating a person just to have them buy the degree from somewhere else.
Umm, no. Not in this case, or in any of the "elite" universities that offer such free materials. Those universities have many more students than they could possibly want dying to get in and pay them tuition. It is not bad business, because they have set the size of their "customer" pool, and the number of prospective customers is larger than the size they have set.
Besides, buying the degree somewhere else is pretty useless. Completion of the courses in TFA will not get you credit:
Online students who successfully complete their chosen course will receive a statement of accomplishment from the instructor, which will include information on how well you did and how your performance compared to other online students. Only students admitted to Stanford and enrolled in the regular course can receive credit or a grade, so this is not a Stanford certificate.
In other words, you get a gold star and perhaps the ability to say that you did better than X% of hundreds of thousands of other slackers. No credential.
See how far you get with a prospective employer by saying, "I know my degree is from Upper Bucksnort State Teachers College, but I've completed free courses through private study in MIT's opencourseware and I have a gold star form letter from Stanford saying that it is not an official record from Stanford, but I did better than 80% of people who probably didn't put in much effort for no credit either."
College degrees are only useful for getting you in the door to your first job or two. An elite name gets more attention in most cases. Offering free "unofficial" Stanford gold stars to anonymous internet folks is not going to dilute Stanford's ability to make money or to place its own graduates.
Online education is ok, but there's no substitute for being able to ask questions in realtime and address issues with an actual teacher.
This is a variation on what is happening in universities across the world. Many professors are recording their lectures. Rather than give the standard lecture during class time they make the recordings available to students. Students are told to watch the lectures on their own time and then class time is used for discussions, Q&A, etc. Personally I thought classes organized like this have been a good idea. Using class time for a professor to perform the same old lecture is a poor use of time. Face-to-face time should be for interaction, not one way communication.
Listening to a rote lecture is not much of an education. A lot of learning occurs during discussions and Q&A. Rote lectures can be watched online at the student's convenience. Universities still have an important role, they actually seem to be on a course to make themselves more valuable. Move the rote lectures online and use that valuable face-to-face time for interaction. Students learn more *and* professors are happier. They don't like giving the same lecture over and over, they much prefer interacting with students -- well the good ones at least.
there's no substitute for being able to ask questions in realtime
That would be awesome but my whole time in college I saw people do that very rarely. Usually teachers have to struggle to get any kind of response out of students.
Some students are just shy and don't like to ask in front of others, others need to absorb the information a little before questions arise.
I think rather than saying "there is no substitute" the model that an online forum can act as a substitute is a really good one. Not only the teachers can answer questions then, but also fellow students - and typing up a thoughtful answer can itself really help you learn more as well.
In a dream world, instead of whatever google system they are planning on using they would instead use a StackOverflow based system where fellow students could up vote the most useful or interesting questions, the professors would answer and as the course progressed you could learn which fellow students to trust for good answers. I don't know that the professors would have to do a ton of answering that way.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
For the AI course, the textbook sounded pretty essential. I think I might already have had the book from my own time at Uni, but I didn't check.
which is totally what she said
All those kids with the One Laptop Per Child computers will be up there learning CS and programming. Millions of programmers and computer scientists will be created.
If only that were so!
But it turns out not that many people actually WANT to program. Even if you teach them for free. Unthinkable for those of us that love it, yes, but that's how it is.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
For the AI class at least, "Peter Norvig is co-author of this text and is donating all royalties earned from his text to charity"
Learning and education. Highly contentious topics infused with politics and the corrupting influence of money sloshing around the system (e.g., textbooks, student loans, tuition fees).
Humanity has passed knowledge on for millennia and what's required is a willing student and a knowledgeable, savvy, patient, rigorous teacher. What our American and British institutions of higher education really are trying to achieve is the ability to instruct the maximum quantity of people at the lowest possible cost with a reasonable degree of effectiveness as measured by testing scores/graduation rates.
I think the open publishing of these courses and course materials is a wonderful thing that could possibly enhance mass literacy and allow curious people access to the finest knowledge pool in the world. It's what a global network should be about: to freely connect people thirsty for knowledge with all the information humanity has accumulated.
After working on technology in higher education for 11 years, I sometimes think all we're doing is tinkering around the edges and using technology as a distraction from addressing the real challenges in educating humanity.
IN advanced CS textbooks are useless. If you are taking Grad level courses in AI and CS only a fool learns from a textbook, you learn from the guys that are CREATING the technology and use textbooks as a reference.
Unless you are attending a school where the CS profs are not the guys doing real work but just there for their tenure.... In that case go to a school where you can learn from the people that are paving the way.
For example: if you are studying WEarable Computing. go to UofToronto and learn from Prof Steve Mann or to the University of Atlanta and learn from Thad Starner. The guys that invented the tech and are the ones that are making the advances.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Oh, and by the way, the idea of students learning the "dry material" outside of class and then coming to class for interaction is not at all new.
In the past, it was called "doing the reading."
I disagree, the lectures and readings are two different things. Very different for the good professors, not so much for the not-so-good. Textbooks do not always line up very well with what a professor may believe needs emphasis. In classes where we had recorded lectures we actually spent more time on the class. These recorded lectures were "additional" content, they did not replace normal readings nor classroom time.
2. What textbook should I buy? There is no need to buy anything. We will provide detailed lecture notes of all the technical content, which will be yours to keep and use as a reference after the end of class. From the Machine Learning info page.
You go to U of Toronto or Atlanta, and let me know what luck you have getting an audience with Mr.'s Mann or Starner. Classroom, or otherwise. The good news is, when that fails you can still find good teachers elsewhere if you know where to look.
Though I'd be genuinely curious to assess Mr. Mann's and Starner's abilities to actually teach. Just because you can do the research doesn't mean you can teach the knowledge gained to someone else. And after reading some of Mr. Mann's books, he doesn't strike me as much of a teacher at all. Even after I get past the question of whether strapping off-the-shelf hardware to one's body really "paves the way" to anything as you suggest.
b.g.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
Textbooks are the base on which you build before you go on checking the current research on a topic - they are not only useful but also quite often essential, both as a reference and as an introductory text. What you just said doesn't make any sense: what if the team which happens to leads in my field is tens of thousands of km away ? What if I study multiple subject dominated by, say, one institute in Belgium and the other in the US ? What if, say, I want to study general architectural theories for common sense reasoning systems, do you think I can go bother Pr. Minsky ? Maybe I should even go see Don Knuth for my advanced algorithmics class. And as another commenter pointed out, you can be a great researcher and a sucky teacher. Or even a so great researcher that you don't necessarily have time to teach. Or... you could just find a good textbook. A textbook written by people who happen to be knowledgeable about the subject and not suck at explaining things (I'm not saying all textbooks are like that - a lot of them are terrible - but there are some pearls that are usually not hard to find to get into a subject quickly).
Don't sign up casually. I've done the machine learning class on line. There is a lot of homework. Expect to spend at least 8 hours a week on the class. Also, the videos consist of Andrew Ng writing math on a chalkboard. An actual chalkboard. In a weird notation where indices are superscripts, rather than subscripts.
A great initiative it is indeed,
but what about all of us that do not have consistent time to spend on a course even though we would love to follow it. even if that means not receiving the note from the teacher to say you passed this course in such and so way... still being allowed to take the exams for your own interest, I know for a fact that I don't have 8 hours a week for homework, but could sqeez out 3 maybe 4 if I push it (and of course there will be the occasional week-end 8 hour marathon run), these courses could as a next step be provided as open lectures without time limitation?
This open approach looks as if it might be a success with well over 100,000 prospective students signing up to the AI course alone.
Only someone who has never, ever, ever taught a class - much less an online class - would consider the enrollment of 100k students a "success". Personally, I call it an unmitigated catastrophe...
(My awed congrats to any instructor/institution that survives such an onslaught, of course...)
Only open for one class and one quarter makes this look like a publicity stunt.. Lots of free advertising for Stanford. For some real online free classes, look into Kahn. http://www.khanacademy.org/
The truth shall set you free!
As technology and human social evolution alter the trajectory of human society, new, unpredictable and interesting results will disrupt the obvious path of our development. Research suggests that an end to poverty and global access to modern education would in fact preclude the many problems facing the world today. The end of poverty and the access to modern education would impact population growth, the availability of health care and the prevention of pandemics and ending the likelihood of war, tribal conflict and outbreaks of violence based purely on social inequality.
Education is the single most important means by which people everywhere may break free of the bonds of poverty. In so doing, drastically altering what is possible for the entire human race. Democratizing the third world and bringing them truly into the 21rst century as full partners in designing a global future. Making comprehensive education available freely to all people is tantamount to ending slavery on a global scale. The tools of knowledge are quickly becoming available to people everywhere, the information itself will make the realization of an enlightened humanity, a dream within our grasp.
Neil Stephenson's "Young Lady's Illustrated Primer Study Guide" may soon be coming to a pad computer near you, wherever you may live. We surely live in the most interesting time in human history... dancing on a razors edge between disaster and the complete liberation of the human spirit. I for one am betting on a future of blazing brilliance and blinding light!
Yeah, but their computer science side seems . . . lacking. I didn't see anything on the level that Stanford is offering.
I read TFA and all I got was this lousy cookie
That works up to a point—although in the life sciences, the textbook industry pounds out new editions as quickly as it can, making torrents perpetually dated and page numbers dangerously useless. Of course, living away from campus only nullifies the library accessibility further... (than it already is, because the courses are crazy-huge. Blegh.)
Strangely, you can consider yourself... lucky to have been able to scrape things together without spending money. I've become an expert in exotic imports instead.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
How does a teacher teach 100,000+ students in one class? At what point does the educator stop talking at the student, and listen to the students understanding?
Hey, there is no need to run down Upper Bucksnort State Teachers College. They've got a great football team.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
I love Stanford to death :)
This is great news. really! But are there any courses on advanced mathematics too? Like on 'Category Theory' or 'non classical logics, e.g. Kripke semantics'. Any pointers?
A passing grade in the AI class is given to students who correctly deduce whether they are being graded by a human or an AI.
Tenure is given on a similar basis: whether the students are submitting original work or plagiarizing off the internet.
Expect the first tenured AI teachers to be announced shortly...
No, I've actually read that before somewhere...
For optimal comment enjoyment, take red pill now.
It isn't hard. Ebooks are more common these days, so a newer edition is likely to have an e version which means it can be cracked and distributed. Otherwise an older version is likely more than sufficient. If worst comes to worst get it out of the library for the entire semester, then get the overdue fees waived.....
If you ignore ACs because they are anonymous - you're an idiot.
As for ebooks: feel free to try tracking down a complete, new copy of Lehninger's Biochemistry.
In general, a lot of university libraries view loaning out textbooks as a "last resort" type of thing, for people studying for a test who forgot or lost theirs. You're allowed to check them out for a matter of hours. It's highly unlikely you could get the fines waived in such a situation.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!