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School's In For Summer At Udacity
theodp writes "Forget about his self-driving cars. CNN reports that Sebastian Thrun's Udacity — where you and 159,999 fellow classmates can take a free, Stanford-caliber online course together at the same time — just might be the future of higher education. Interestingly, of all the students taking Thrun's AI class globally and at Stanford, the top 410 students were online; the 411th top performer was a Stanford student. 'We just found over 400 people in the world who outperformed the top Stanford student,' Thrun said."
are they factoring in that the online students may have much, much, much... much more free time than a "brick and mortar" student?
Seriously consider the possibility that an in-person student may be taking many classes all at once, with attention diversified versus someone online who may only be taking one class.
As I said, I haven't read the article.
If all the courses are free, and they offer the ones I want, I'd pick up Mechanical Engineering + Physics + Chemistry degrees, then work my way through the liberal arts degrees. That Political Science degree will look nice mounted under my MCSE certificate. ;-)
I am John Hurt.
Anyone who pays top tier tuition versus someone who pays a fraction of the cost for the class online not only has issues of intelligence but also I think sanity might come into question also.
That is where we need to go with jobs more certificates / vocational learning / non degree / apprenticeships.
And less big one size fit's all degrees.
Better hope he doesn't grade on a curve.
If there really were 160k and he finished 401 then he finished in the top 0.25%. BTW, what's this about "Stanford-Caliber" courses? I mean I went to a fairly well regarded private university and lets say the quality of their courses was rather underwhelming. (I later took classes at a public university that is supposedly not in the private's league and the education they offered was as good if not better. Then again they didn't have loads of top researchers which is what those rankings are about anyway. Yes, I'm jaded.)
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If the classes are good, who cares who's on top or not? The whole bit about other students doing better than an in person one doesn't matter a bit to me. Neither does the whole degree / not degree thing.
What matters is whether there's something really interesting/useful to learn. If you're looking to just get your degree and get out of school and forget learning, well... I suggest you get an MBA. This kind of thing is really great for those of us with a thirst for knowledge and learning that merely got its START when we were in college.
The Digital Sorceress
I am sure that that the online courses are good. I am sure that the online students are as collaborative and work just as hard and are just as honest as the students who are working on similar projects at standford or any other university. But the hyperbole is a bit much. And the overly competitive air, that the top students are online, is also a bit much. The purpose of the university is to learn, and the GPA, or winning a single competition, or having someone else take your tests, is hardly a meaningful way of choosing the top students. Serious schools and professors tend not to do this, unless maybe you are in the financial sector. Success to me is determined by who actually goes out into the world and creates some innovative product or some original research.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Too many people go to college just to go. We need more technical schools and apprentice programs to teach them skills that will actually help them get a job.
Why wouldn't s/he, if s/he was already getting an education and degree from one of the top colleges in the country? Nobody cares about anybody's grades from Udacity, but grad schools and some employers (e.g. Google) do ask for college transcripts.
And that's assuming there really WAS a Stanford student enrolled, and there might not be.
Sounds like stupid small business advertising tricks to me. "Hey, what do we have to lose?"
My master's program is a "hybrid" - half our classes are in the brick and mortar building, for times when we have guest lectures or exercises that need to be done in person. The other half are conducted via an online classroom, where we can just as easily see the powerpoint and hear our professor's voice, but we don't have to leave home. My husband is teaching his summer session classes entirely in asynchronous online time, posting assignments and readings and grading them and hosting forum based discussions of the topics. (Everyone has to make a forum post for participation credit.)
At this point, the only value coming from a fully paid program versus an online program is accreditation (there's a reason that diploma mill degrees are looked down upon) and the contacts that distinguished faculty members have for their students. Also, brick and mortar institutions are better for lab and research oriented classes. I don't think my plant physiology classes back in undergrad days when I minored in botany would have been as fulfilling without the labs, where we got to blend, electrocute, and otherwise torture plants to measure all the stuff their guts were doing. Sure, we could do all the organic chemistry and mathematics online, but those equations need to translate to the real world too.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
IT jobs need to drop the NEED CS degree idea as that is number more of a programing skill set but some CS is way more the high level theory side then what most programing skills need. Now for all IT jobs some theory is nice to have but the CS level is over kill and the time can be better off doing stuff that is more like real work.
Think taking a EE over some who did electricians apprenticeship to a electricians job. Even power line man have apprenticeship that just need high school to get in.
Also IT need a lot of hands on learning and counting education and the CS degree is a poor fit for that. Also the college time tables don't fit it that well also.
Even worse is IT jobs that they need ANY degree. That would be like taking a hiring for a plumber and saying that your plumber apprenticeship does not count but some with a underwater basket weaving degree gets that job.
Now who do want working on your car some with a car engineering degree or some who when to auto trade school and has ASE Certification?
Just because a student is attending college (or has) doesn't mean that they are superior. Many folks have other responsibilities and endeavors in life besides college. Also, these other non-college people are just as busy as any college student. I, personally, am more busy outside college than I was during college.
Why don't they just post the videos, and let me watch them?
I neither want, nor need, any "program" or other stuff. I just want to get the information, as efficiently as possible.
"are they factoring in that the online students may have much, much, much... much more free time than a "brick and mortar" student?"
Are you serious?
Both myself and most of the people I know that have been interested in these online classes are older and have full-time jobs. We squeeze in our lecture watching and homework during lunch hours and instead of the evening TV. We emphatically do -not- have more free time than a standard student (and we should know, since we were students once too, with free time, before our jobs and families took over).
And just to be clear, I know for certain that many of the "400" (twice as good as a movie?) are these sort of people and not, somehow, unemployed layabouts drowning in free time. In fact, logically, the world's smartest people will already be doing something else productive with their free time... either gainful employment or "brick and mortar" education, so this should not be surprising at all.
To summarize:
"brick and mortar" students have (generally) no other obligations on their time but study.
Online students are generally already brick and mortar students as well, or else holding down full time jobs. They do not have more free time.
So he is still in the top 411/160,000 (.26 %) Same as being first in a class of 400.
Intro to Statistics: Making Decisions Based on Data
... we're in winter, in case you didn't notice.
Just FYI.
As an aside, consider how uninformative is saying software A will be release by Fall.
are they factoring in that the automobile drivers may have much, much, much... much more free time than a "horse and buggy" driver?
Seriously consider the possibility that an equestrian driver may be having to feed, stable, and shoe all at once, with attention diversified versus someone driving a car who may only be putting in gas and driving.
Or outcheated him.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
I have taken classes both at Udacity and Stanford. I found that the Stanford class was more like a traditional classroom brought online. The Udacity course felt like it was designed from the beginning as an online experience.
I just want to get the information, as efficiently as possible.
You're welcome.
Don't you know the U.S. is the center of the Universe? :-)
I took the class and was tied for rank 1, but I have an engineering degree from a Stanford-caliber school and the 411th guy was still an undergrad. It's an interesting statistic, but it's not an apples-to-apples comparison
I have a Stanford MSCS degree from the 1980s. Frankly, the teaching wasn't all that great. Other than Zohar Manna's class on mathematical logic, none of the lecturers had really good presentations. Having the chance to argue with John McCarthy was fun, though. I know things have improved since then. (CS was moved from Arts and Sciences to Engineering and given adult supervision. That helped.)
More recently, I've struggled through the original online Stanford machine learning course (pre-Udacity) starring Andrew Ng. Hacker Dojo offered it as a class, with meetings, two years ago. There he is, writing semi-legible math on a chalkboard (not even a whiteboard) for an hour at a time. The handouts don't quite match the videos, the motivation for much of the math is lacking, and the notation in the field is awful. (Sometimes a subscript is an exponent, and sometimes it's an index, depending on context. The precedence of operators is non-obvious and unstated. And everything, of course, is written with minimal parentheses.) Most of the concepts in that field have a geometrical interpretation, but there weren't enough pictures to give an intuitive understanding of what's the math is doing. What's actually going on is often not that complicated, but you don't get that impression from the lectures.
Some of the big-name universities work only because their students are so good they can make sense out of mediocre instruction. It's really the labs and the other students that make it worthwhile.
I have been hearing all this hype about how innovative online classes are, how this will change teaching, how we might not have colleges any more because it is so revolutionary. I am a little skeptical of the hyperbole of the "future of education" as the blurb puts it.
I have watched videos on Youtube etc. to try to learn things. Sometimes the videos are not explicitly meant to be educational - Walt Mossberg interviewing some tech guy for All Things Digital can be more educational than a classroom lecture sometimes.
Sometimes they are meant to be educational. The videos I've watched have been in two categories. The first type is a company like Google has someone on stage with a Powerpoint explaining one of their newest APIs. The second type is a video of a professor in front of a classroom explaining some math or computer science concept.
Your mileage may vary. In the case of Google explaining an API, or the professor, many times they have a thick foreign accent. Google is a little better about this then some random professor's class, but not always. Then there's the question about how good of a teacher they are. Yes, they may know the API or math/CS concept in and out, they may have even wrote or discovered it, how good are they at explaining the concept to layman students? Often they have little capacity to do this.
Video is not magic. If a smart person who understands the topic and can also write clearly writes a textbook or manual explaining a math/CS concept or some API, this is often far, far more helpful than some videotape of some professor with a thick foreign accent who is not good at explaining things.
And case in point is Thrun himself! Videotapes of him are streams of sentences like "I haff a-bout an hou-ER too doo thees" (I have about an hour to do this) in his German accent which I struggle a little bit to understand. I'd probably better understand what he is trying to teach if he wrote it down.
In the 1980s, Abelson and Sussman up at MIT made videotapes of their lectures on the structure and interpretation of computer programs. Then going back to the 15th century with Gutenberg's Latin textbooks. Yes it's nice that we have lectures on Youtube now, but the "future of education" sounds a little bit like hyperbole to me. The important thing it seems to me is to find a native speaker of your language, who understands the topic thoroughly, and who can communicate it clearly, who puts it together for you. Then whatever form they take - online lecture, classroom lecture, book - whatever - is helpful. A well-written book or clear and thought out classroom lecture beats an online lecture. I can always ask the professor after class if I don't understand something. I can't watch Sussman's 1980s lecture and then ask him what cons does in LISP (although I guess I could e-mail him).
The one that goes something "The difference between the education at an elite school and a non elite school isn't the education, it's the other stuff." (IE Like you say, access to research equipment, chance to network with elite professors and other elite students, etc. The classes are pretty much the same.)
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(1) There's no way you're getting the same feedback on your work in a class of 400+ as you would in even a normally-sized (~100-150) freshmen level lecture. You are ESPECIALLY not getting the same feedback as you would in a normally sized upper-division, major-area studies course (~20-40). So that's an element of the instruction this Udacity course misses out on.
(2) A well-delivered lesson responds to the students. Every class is different, even if you're delivering two sections of the same material back-to-back. Each group will get some things quicker and need more time spent on other things. Good professors tailor the presentation on the fly to the needs of the particular class, which is why you need actual experts on the subject to deliver a university-level lecture - if it were a set routine, you could write it out and hire someone for minimum wage to run through it! Lecturing is significantly about being able to "read" an audience. Only the least interested, least competent instructors go through the material by rote with no variance and no responsiveness to the classroom. So Udacity has found a way to offer courses that are bottlenecked to the lowest possible level of quality that university instruction can achieve, regardless of the sophistication of the material.
(3) & (4) A LOT of learning in the classroom comes from other students. I'm not talking about group projects and such - I think those are bullshit, too. I'm talking about class discussion. Even when students don't realize it, they often learn a great deal from their fellow students' questions and comments. Ideally, there will be cross-talk among students about the material, too, which is highly productive because a bit part of learning a subject isn't just learning the material as such but learning about how people other than yourself respond to the material - even in the hard sciences, it's enlightening to get a sense of what OTHER people struggle with, as it gives you a better sense of the contours of the subject as a whole. This point is more related to the overall project of the university, rather than just the mastery of a given subject in a given class, but it's important to remember that there IS a whole other kind of instruction going on when you're participating with others in a common curriculum - you're learning about them and yourself, too, while you're all learning about the subject at hand. Udacity classes strip away all of this.
There are undoubtedly no small number of university classes where the students get no meaningful feedback, where the instructor's presentation of the material is not responsive to the classroom, and where students are, for one reason or another, made to feel isolated from other students and cannot learn from their peers while engaging the material. But those are the BAD CLASSES. Udacity is free, sure, but it d**n well ought to be, since it's offering virtually no advantage over just reading a well-written book on the subject. If this ever replaces actual university instruction, we're all screwed.
I don't see how this is newsworthy... China has more honours students than the US has students. The US has what, 300 million people? The world has 6 billion. Chances are pretty good the brightest are going to come from elsewhere.
This has all the elements for highly-concentrated butthurt, seconded only by bitcoin or political stories. The class happens to be about AI, which becomes meta. Then you have the racism. Plus all the usual baggage that delights us all in the IT industry (yes including me). Bookmarked while I go get popcorn--this'll save me movie money!
I took exactly one online class and I had way more time for it as when I was a student. I do not work full time currently and I had multiple classes when I was a student. In addition, I took a course about topic I already knew a lot about. Sanford students have seen the topic for the first time in their lives.
Consequently, I ended up with top score. E.g.,if it would be AI, I would be one of those 411 winners. It does not mean that I'm better then Sanford students nor it means that online learning is somehow superior. It just means that I started with huge advantages.
Lastly, there are thousandths of online students and only few hundred Sanford students. There is nothing shocking about finding few hundred talented and hardworking people (not counting me) among those. It still says nothing about whether online university would be equivalent to best traditional university.
"a free, Stanford-caliber online course".
Who is making this claim? Normally when you attach a link to a statement it is because the link provides some supporting evidence for the statement. That is not the case here.
As far as I am aware, neither Thrun nor anyone associated with Udacity has made a claim that the online classes are Stanford-level. I have taken two of his online classes. Thrun is brilliant and I enjoyed his lectures a lot. However, the homework and exams are not at a top 20 University level.
Please have some consideration for the more credulous of the online students. Based on my perusals of the class forums, some of them really believe that they are getting a Stanford-level education. I think this is largely due to the copy-and-paste media monkeys that continue to promote the fallacy that these classes are Stanford-level.
Cross-talk and meaningful feedback can be done online nowadays.
Hi
I took AI,DB and ML from Stanford and am doing my second course from Udacity. For people like me in Asia who cant afford an American education this is a very good opportunity. And most of the people on these courses have full time jobs so please don't assume they have free time to ace AI.I myself had a bit of stuggle and dropped out of the Coursera ones. The Coursera courses conducted by Stanford and 2 other univs are at a higher calibre and more demanding. Try the compilers one, I couldn't survive after 4 weeks just couldnt make up the time to do the assignments.
Udacity is certainly much lighter and am just looking at some as a revision of what I already know.
Will this help get a job, dont know but it has certainly improved my persepective in my job and overall.
I was wondering, how does Udacity make money? selling user data? advertisements?
How does Udacity make money? ads? selling user information?