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Professor Resigns From Stanford To Launch Online Education Project
mikejuk writes "Professor Sebastian Thrun has given up his Stanford position to start Udacity — an online educational venture. Udacity's first two free courses are Building a Search Engine and Programming a Robotic Car. In a moving speech at the Digital Life Design conference, he explained that after presenting the online AI course to thousands of students he could no longer teach at Stanford: 'Now that I saw the true power of education, there is no turning back. It's like a drug. I won't be able to teach 200 students again, in a conventional classroom setting.' Let's hope Udacity works out; Stanford is a tough act to follow."
Thrun is (I think) the first tenured Professor at a major University to stand down in order to try to bring learning online. Unlike the offerings from Stanford, MIT, Berkeley etc etc, Udacity wont be under the same "Don't damage the university's business model" constraint, so they are truly free to go for broke.
There has been a lot of criticism of the AI course - most of it by people who didn't attend beyond the first couple of weeks. I finished the course and had a good time doing it. It wasn't without flaws, but I have no doubt that with the necessary financial backing, they can make the necessary improvements and push on to create some remarkable content.
If they can solve the question of certification, they, and those who will inevitably follow, might just revolutionise the educational landscape.
And if it all goes wrong, Google wont kick him out of bed.
If a video of a lecture is as useful as the live lecture, it's a bad lecture.
I'd be careful with that statement. If you claim there must be some interaction, then let's get real: you don't want to be interrupted by questions every 15 seconds. So live questioning as a feedback from students to the lecturer is out. Then the most interaction you'll get is the lecturer looking at faces and body language of students.
But what does that tell the lecturer? Nothing that's very applicable when the medium is video!! In a video lecture, if you feel like falling asleep, you pause it, get up, walk around, come back refreshed, start watching again a few minutes back into the recording to get back on topic. If you need to look something up, you can pause, google for it, look in a book, look in previous lectures, then resume when you're ready. Those two situations cover most of the realtime feedback a lecturer would use, I'd presume. So, failing to show particular examples of how the reverse channel helps in a prerecorded lecture, I call your claim an gross exaggeration at best. Audience feedback is important in a live lecture setting, recorded lectures are really quite different because the student controls the playback. Good luck pausing the professor when you feel like dozing off for 45 minutes in the auditorium :)
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
I find it interesting though, that Sebastian Thrun gets so much attention, and Andrew Ng for example, gets no mention. I think that Ng poured in a tremendous amount of effort to teach an absolutely outstanding class with far more structured and well-developed content.
Don't get me wrong, Thrun is an enthusiastic and obviously knowledgeable individual, but having followed both AI and ML classes, I was of the opinion that Andrew Ng was the better teacher. Thrun needs to improve his teaching skills, so that he can impart his great store of knowledge better to students. Although that is my personal opinion, I think you might find that it is backed by some evidence, if you were to trawl through the comments on the respective forums of the AI and ML classes. Overall, both of them + Peter Norvig and the rest of their teams, made fantastic contributions, and that should be recognized equally, whenever possible!