The class Sebastian Thrun taught on AI, was a class devoid of all the qualities that made CS 221 one of the (formerly) greatest classes in not only the CS department, but all of Stanford. His AI class was dumbed down and slapped with a Stanford logo to make people think that they were performing at the same academic level as top notch university students when in fact he had simply lowered the level of achievement so that anyone could take the class. AI is hard. Machine learning is hard. Computer science is hard. Not everyone can do it, and no online course will change that fact.
Why can I say this? These are class reviews of CS 221 from Courserank before and after Sebastian Thrun made it his flagship for online teaching.
Note: When taught by Andrew Ng the class received no ratings less than 4/5 stars
"4/5 Stars
Autumn 2006-2007
Andrew Ng
A+
0 of 0 people found this review helpful
Covers a broad spectrum of topics in AI. If you are interested in AI, but you aren't sure what area in AI you might want to take classes in or you don't know much about AI, this is a good class to take. After CS 221, you can go on to CS 229 (machine learning), CS 223B (computer vision), CS 224N (natural language processing), etc. This class is a lot of work, and most of it is valuable although not all of the programming assignments were that well designed when I took it."
Good class. Andrew isn't the most exciting lecturer, but you'll learn a lot of different AI techniques, and the programming assignments are interesting. The problem sets and midterm are heavily algebra/proof-based, so be prepared. Work through the section problems and you should be fine with that.
Since all psets, assignments, and the final project can all be done with a team, make sure you have at least 2 other people you know you can work with, or else you'll get dragged down."
I really enjoyed this class. Very interesting topics, long and involved problem sets, and not-so-difficult programming assignments. Except, of course, for the final project. GET A GROUP ... I had to drop down to CR/NC because my partners dropped the class, and so I spent most of dead and finals weeks working on this stupid robot dog.
Terrific class with great lecture material and interesting videos. I think the Audi parallel parking itself by driving backwards at 40mph, braking, and sliding into the parking spot was what kept me going.
The problem sets make sure you really understand the material, and the programming assignments are a great way to learn Matlab. The project is HARD and time comsuming, so make sure you have time in your schedule near the end of the quarter!"
Note: Under Sebastian Thrun the class has received no rating higher than 3/5 stars, even more telling, look at the comments for Autumn 2011/12 when the online system that Udacity is based off of was rolled out for Stanford students.
"3/5 Stars
Winter 2010-2011
Sebastian B Thrun
A-
5 of 5 people found this review helpful
With Thrun class had a very different feel than it would have Ng. It skimped on the math/theory and focused on intuition and practice. I liked it less, but for people who are less interested in the math, it was an improvement."
If you can take this class with Andrew Ng I would recommend it. The version I took was pretty poorly taught. The lectures lacked both detail and clear explanations of the concepts. I feel like I came out of this class without having learned much of anything."
"User had not rated this course at the time of reviewing
7 of 7 people found this review helpful
As the quarter wore on it became painfully clear that the focus on students was minimal for this class. Lectures aligned poorly with homework material, coding assignments were rarely well designed, and grading procedures were at best illogical and at worst completely incomprehensible."
This class was a waste of time. Seriously. The only beneficial part to me was the final project. Everything else was so frustratingly simplified and easy that I wanted to slap myself for taking this class.
Here's an actual problem from the midterm that demonstrates our professor's opinion of Stanford students:
For a coin X, we know P(heads) = 0.3
What is P(tails)?
And whenever there was anything REMOTELY difficult, the teachers would, without fail, give a hint...
Just skip to 229. It may be tougher, but this class is not worth it anymore."
"User had not rated this course at the time of reviewing
6 of 6 people found this review helpful
Hands down the worst class I have ever taken in my life. This was a joke of a class, far too easy so the curve was mind boggling (the average on the midterm was around 97% because they gave the same test to us as they did to the online class).
Essentially, this class catered to its free online constituency that doesn't pay for tuition. Seriously, I am completely ashamed of this class, and it has no place in one of the best AI universities int he world. Only take it if u need it, otherwise go straight to 229 or something else much better."
"User had not rated this course at the time of reviewing
4 of 4 people found this review helpful
This course is useless and you should probably take it only if you have to.
The class should be the Stanford class given to anyone for free, but it has became the class for anyone given at Stanford (where we have to pay for it).
The homeworks were really easy, the only difficulty was to understand what was expected with poor indications. The real lectures sometimes conflicted with the online videos, and in this case the teachers considered the online video as the reference. This means that going to the class every morning instead of looking at free online video gives you a disadvange in this class. (confirmed by the TAs and posted on the class forums).
In one sentence : if possible take the online free class instead of paying for it. It will even be better."
I'm very surprised that it sounds like he used his Udacity course as the material for the actual Stanford course. That's a huge disservice to Stanford students.
Online education is going to take time to develop. If the courses are too difficult, very few people would make it through them. At this stage, they need the idea to catch on more than anything else. Once it catches on and they can establish legitimacy (i.e. being able to hand out degrees or find people jobs), then it'll be easier to convince prospective students to deal with more challenging material. It's a balancing act.
So much negativity here. Udacity is great. I have a finance background and struggled through some MIT OCW courses when I was learning how to program, and then ended up taking a year's worth of computer science courses at UF. One year later I have my first b2b web application with several dozen paying customers. I'm now taking some udacity courses and boy, I sure wish these existed 2 years ago. Udacity won't turn you into a world class computer scientist, but it is a wonderful way to learn and improve.
"Udacity won't turn you into a world class computer scientist, but it is a wonderful way to learn and improve."
Exactly, Udacity is essentially a more interactive version of w3schools and other tutorial websites. With a more expansive collection of areas of study.
The problem stems from this statement, the crux of this post: "Is Sebastian Thrun's Udacity the future of higher education?"
That's where the negativity comes in. As you said, Udacity won't make you a world class computer scientists, but that's what universities like Stanford, MIT, UW, Michigan, Caltech, CMU and other top CS schools are /supposed/ to do.
If you want to learn what AI is generally about, Udacity can help. But if you want to build a career out it, and become and actual expert, these sites fall flat on their faces. By embracing Udacity and Coursera as tools of higher education, Stanford and universities that follow suit are damaging the quality of the education they provide.
What portion of any of the hot online education projects could have been done without the web? For instance, how much of each of them could have been replicated by mailing people DVD/VHS lecture videos and quiz software? If most of it could be done without the web, why wasn't it? Cost? Excessive waiting and friction caused by going through the mail?
I agree with almost everything I've read of what Khan has said, and Thrun is certainly impressive. But when other people go nuts about the possibilities of online education, they seem to imply that the primary hindrance to educational success worldwide has been a lack of access to video lectures. For most students, I do not think that is the case.
The biggest disruption is zero cost, better lecture format and systematic approach.
1. Zero cost.
Yes, there are plenty of web-accessible, paid educational material. Many people make good
business from it (e.g. lynda.com). Zero cost is a differentiator.
Also, the paid material is usually vocational (e.g. teaching you how to use photoshop), not physics 101, the kind of material you study in college. I assume that's because college already exists, gives out diplomas so for-profit enterprises don't try to compete with colleges.
2. Better lecture format.
There are free, high-quality lectures (MIT's OCW etc.) but while the content might be high-quality, the experience is awful. At first I was excited about OCW but just couldn't bear to sit through 1 hr lecture with paltry written notes.
Udacity uses the format pioneered by Khan Academy of short videos, has supplemental like exercises and has a clear path from start to finish.
3. Systematic approach.
Again, compared to previous initiatives like MIT's OCW, Udacity's goal is to provide complete courses. Clearly they are at the beginning of delivering that but I think that we can all agree that their Minimal Viable Product has been very successful, which validates product-market fit, and it's also clear from interviews that Udacity has much bigger goals and they are executing pretty aggressively on them. Remember, Facebook didn't have 600 million users on the first day.
The timing is probably more important than the actual technology used. People's attitudes towards education have changed dramatically in the past few years, in my opinion.
It wasn't long ago that Google bragged that they would only hire the best students from top universities. Now they have hired people just because they have successfully completed a Udacity course, have college dropouts amongst their ranks, you name it. That is a pretty dramatic shift in such a short time, and they're not the only company to follow in those footsteps.
It is not that mail-order education was impossible years ago, but nobody would have taken it seriously. There was a strong leaning that a college degree from a traditional school was the only way to make it. Without that, you were going to flipping burgers at McDonalds.
I think people are now ready for new ways of learning and it just happens that the web is now a great way to distribute that education.
> For most students, I do not think that is the case.
Unfortunately, most students in this world have shamefully little access to quality education. Access is definitely a problem.
Even well-funded education systems have limited access to the best possible resources. The best resources are scattered everywhere, from Stanford professors to worksheets on some teacher's desk in Idaho. Getting them online is a big step.
I think that "consuming education" via video + interactive quizzes (and course-specific chat room & in person meetups) is much more attractive, and engaging, than sitting on your couch watching a DVD.
It is pretty incredible to know that learning a topic of interest is literally a few clicks away...
Also, on another note, it could be that since my cost as a student is almost zero (let's take the value of my time out of the equation) then I am more willing to "try" a class and, since the Udacity classes tend to be engaging, I actually stick around.
Edit: IMO Udacity is a great way to start learning something new, such as basic CS stuff.
At the very least Udacity seems to be winning the PR war. Coursera had the same origin as Thrun's AI class, and arguably had the better platform/user-experience from day one and today offers many more courses than Udacity - yet all the attention seems to be on Udacity only.
I think online, low-cost education will supplant courses taught with low or no instructor-to-student interaction in a very short window of time.
Less obviously, I think that mentors (teachers and professors at all levels) who provide value to individual learners will stay in high demand, along with the institutions that employ them. I also think that the personal networks of these mentors will become the gateway to top-level employment in many fields.
As someone who is vaguely familiar with programming and got about 1/2 way through the Udacity Python course I was disappointed with the education I received. Udacity courses seem to gamify to the extreme, giving hyper-specific tasks and immediate feedback without that much context or exploration.
I decided to sign up for an O'Reilly School of Technology course instead. Yes it's not free, but I fee like I am actually learning something.
I don't believe that the intent is to replace higher education for the tiny fraction of us who are lucky enough to be able to afford it thanks to money, time or location, but to make it much more widely available. Sebastian's quote from the end of the article:
"It's the beginning of higher education for everybody."
As a current Udacity Student I believe that we are reaching (or have reached) the tipping point for online education.
The Udacity classes are very informative and relatively engaging (love the lecture quizzes), however, I do believe that there is still a lot of room for improvements.
On another note, I am pretty excited about the upcoming local Udacity Meetups (http://udacity.meetup.com/).
(note: did not read the CNN article) I think that all the complaining about the lack of difficulty is completely missing Thrun's and Norvig's objectives. The most important thing educators provide is inspiration, not information or putting students through mental push ups ad nauseam. I think Thrun's classes are extremely effective in that regard.
Often we forget, that "higher education" is just as much about building networks and adaptation, as learning traditional material. You learn what's acceptable, what kinds of people are successful, and what kinds of people you work best with.
You meet the people who are going to find you that dream job. If you're an entrepreneur, you find the people who you'll want working for/with you. You meet the people who'll help you get things done.
The question here really shouldn't be about whether Udacity is a good educational model. It should be about how far it can go - and I absolutely do not believe it is a replacement for traditional "higher education".
I read somewhere that Udacity's long-term business model is to profit through building those networks. Of course business models can change, but as it stands they have a lot of incentive to provide those foundations, more so than the education itself.
A little off topic, but when is the testing center partnership being started? I read the blog post announcing it, but there was no exact date on when one go and take the test.
Courses should not be "watered down". They should be as hard as they are at top universities, other wise they will lose credibility.
Do primer courses, leading on to the harder courses if you have to.
This revolution should be used to make high-end knowledge available to everyone who seeks it, not to water-down that knowledge. I want online courses, but good ones which are comparable to top courses.
[+] [-] avsbst|13 years ago|reply
The class Sebastian Thrun taught on AI, was a class devoid of all the qualities that made CS 221 one of the (formerly) greatest classes in not only the CS department, but all of Stanford. His AI class was dumbed down and slapped with a Stanford logo to make people think that they were performing at the same academic level as top notch university students when in fact he had simply lowered the level of achievement so that anyone could take the class. AI is hard. Machine learning is hard. Computer science is hard. Not everyone can do it, and no online course will change that fact.
Why can I say this? These are class reviews of CS 221 from Courserank before and after Sebastian Thrun made it his flagship for online teaching.
============================================================
BEFORE:
============================================================
Note: When taught by Andrew Ng the class received no ratings less than 4/5 stars
"4/5 Stars
Autumn 2006-2007
Andrew Ng
A+
0 of 0 people found this review helpful
Covers a broad spectrum of topics in AI. If you are interested in AI, but you aren't sure what area in AI you might want to take classes in or you don't know much about AI, this is a good class to take. After CS 221, you can go on to CS 229 (machine learning), CS 223B (computer vision), CS 224N (natural language processing), etc. This class is a lot of work, and most of it is valuable although not all of the programming assignments were that well designed when I took it."
------------------------------------------------------------
"5/5 Stars
Winter 2008-2009
Andrew Ng
A-
0 of 0 people found this review helpful
Good class. Andrew isn't the most exciting lecturer, but you'll learn a lot of different AI techniques, and the programming assignments are interesting. The problem sets and midterm are heavily algebra/proof-based, so be prepared. Work through the section problems and you should be fine with that.
Since all psets, assignments, and the final project can all be done with a team, make sure you have at least 2 other people you know you can work with, or else you'll get dragged down."
------------------------------------------------------------
"5/5 Stars
Winter 2008-2009
Andrew Ng
CR
0 of 0 people found this review helpful
I really enjoyed this class. Very interesting topics, long and involved problem sets, and not-so-difficult programming assignments. Except, of course, for the final project. GET A GROUP ... I had to drop down to CR/NC because my partners dropped the class, and so I spent most of dead and finals weeks working on this stupid robot dog.
That being said, I loved the class."
------------------------------------------------------------
"5/5 Stars
Autumn 2009-2010
Andrew Ng
A-
0 of 0 people found this review helpful
Terrific class with great lecture material and interesting videos. I think the Audi parallel parking itself by driving backwards at 40mph, braking, and sliding into the parking spot was what kept me going.
The problem sets make sure you really understand the material, and the programming assignments are a great way to learn Matlab. The project is HARD and time comsuming, so make sure you have time in your schedule near the end of the quarter!"
============================================================
AFTER:
============================================================
Note: Under Sebastian Thrun the class has received no rating higher than 3/5 stars, even more telling, look at the comments for Autumn 2011/12 when the online system that Udacity is based off of was rolled out for Stanford students.
"3/5 Stars
Winter 2010-2011
Sebastian B Thrun
A-
5 of 5 people found this review helpful
With Thrun class had a very different feel than it would have Ng. It skimped on the math/theory and focused on intuition and practice. I liked it less, but for people who are less interested in the math, it was an improvement."
------------------------------------------------------------
"3/5 Stars
Winter 2010-2011
Sebastian B Thrun
A-
5 of 5 people found this review helpful
If you can take this class with Andrew Ng I would recommend it. The version I took was pretty poorly taught. The lectures lacked both detail and clear explanations of the concepts. I feel like I came out of this class without having learned much of anything."
------------------------------------------------------------
"1/5 Stars
Autumn 2011-2012
Sebastian B Thrun
B
7 of 7 people found this review helpful
Hands down the worst class I have taken at Stanford. Terribly taught, unresponsive and incompetent TAs, mixed up deadlines. Avoid at all costs."
------------------------------------------------------------
"User had not rated this course at the time of reviewing
5 of 5 people found this review helpful
god awful. learned absolutely nothing."
------------------------------------------------------------
"User had not rated this course at the time of reviewing
7 of 7 people found this review helpful
As the quarter wore on it became painfully clear that the focus on students was minimal for this class. Lectures aligned poorly with homework material, coding assignments were rarely well designed, and grading procedures were at best illogical and at worst completely incomprehensible."
------------------------------------------------------------
"2/5 Stars
Autumn 2011-2012
Sebastian B Thrun
A-
4 of 4 people found this review helpful
This class was a waste of time. Seriously. The only beneficial part to me was the final project. Everything else was so frustratingly simplified and easy that I wanted to slap myself for taking this class.
Here's an actual problem from the midterm that demonstrates our professor's opinion of Stanford students:
For a coin X, we know P(heads) = 0.3 What is P(tails)?
And whenever there was anything REMOTELY difficult, the teachers would, without fail, give a hint...
Just skip to 229. It may be tougher, but this class is not worth it anymore."
------------------------------------------------------------
"User had not rated this course at the time of reviewing
6 of 6 people found this review helpful
Hands down the worst class I have ever taken in my life. This was a joke of a class, far too easy so the curve was mind boggling (the average on the midterm was around 97% because they gave the same test to us as they did to the online class).
Essentially, this class catered to its free online constituency that doesn't pay for tuition. Seriously, I am completely ashamed of this class, and it has no place in one of the best AI universities int he world. Only take it if u need it, otherwise go straight to 229 or something else much better."
------------------------------------------------------------
"User had not rated this course at the time of reviewing
4 of 4 people found this review helpful
This course is useless and you should probably take it only if you have to.
The class should be the Stanford class given to anyone for free, but it has became the class for anyone given at Stanford (where we have to pay for it).
The homeworks were really easy, the only difficulty was to understand what was expected with poor indications. The real lectures sometimes conflicted with the online videos, and in this case the teachers considered the online video as the reference. This means that going to the class every morning instead of looking at free online video gives you a disadvange in this class. (confirmed by the TAs and posted on the class forums).
In one sentence : if possible take the online free class instead of paying for it. It will even be better."
RELATED:
Jeff Atwood’s blog post “Please Don’t Learn to Code” (http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/05/please-dont-learn-t...).
Kurt Vonnegut’s “Harrison Bergeron” from Welcome to the Monkey House
Edit: Fixed whitespace
TL;DR: Learn AI Hard. Thrun make class dumb. Now anybody learn AI.
[+] [-] unknown|13 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] capsule_toy|13 years ago|reply
Online education is going to take time to develop. If the courses are too difficult, very few people would make it through them. At this stage, they need the idea to catch on more than anything else. Once it catches on and they can establish legitimacy (i.e. being able to hand out degrees or find people jobs), then it'll be easier to convince prospective students to deal with more challenging material. It's a balancing act.
[+] [-] porter|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] avsbst|13 years ago|reply
Exactly, Udacity is essentially a more interactive version of w3schools and other tutorial websites. With a more expansive collection of areas of study.
The problem stems from this statement, the crux of this post: "Is Sebastian Thrun's Udacity the future of higher education?"
That's where the negativity comes in. As you said, Udacity won't make you a world class computer scientists, but that's what universities like Stanford, MIT, UW, Michigan, Caltech, CMU and other top CS schools are /supposed/ to do.
If you want to learn what AI is generally about, Udacity can help. But if you want to build a career out it, and become and actual expert, these sites fall flat on their faces. By embracing Udacity and Coursera as tools of higher education, Stanford and universities that follow suit are damaging the quality of the education they provide.
[+] [-] sopooneo|13 years ago|reply
I agree with almost everything I've read of what Khan has said, and Thrun is certainly impressive. But when other people go nuts about the possibilities of online education, they seem to imply that the primary hindrance to educational success worldwide has been a lack of access to video lectures. For most students, I do not think that is the case.
[+] [-] kkowalczyk|13 years ago|reply
1. Zero cost.
Yes, there are plenty of web-accessible, paid educational material. Many people make good business from it (e.g. lynda.com). Zero cost is a differentiator.
Also, the paid material is usually vocational (e.g. teaching you how to use photoshop), not physics 101, the kind of material you study in college. I assume that's because college already exists, gives out diplomas so for-profit enterprises don't try to compete with colleges.
2. Better lecture format.
There are free, high-quality lectures (MIT's OCW etc.) but while the content might be high-quality, the experience is awful. At first I was excited about OCW but just couldn't bear to sit through 1 hr lecture with paltry written notes.
Udacity uses the format pioneered by Khan Academy of short videos, has supplemental like exercises and has a clear path from start to finish.
3. Systematic approach.
Again, compared to previous initiatives like MIT's OCW, Udacity's goal is to provide complete courses. Clearly they are at the beginning of delivering that but I think that we can all agree that their Minimal Viable Product has been very successful, which validates product-market fit, and it's also clear from interviews that Udacity has much bigger goals and they are executing pretty aggressively on them. Remember, Facebook didn't have 600 million users on the first day.
[+] [-] randomdata|13 years ago|reply
It wasn't long ago that Google bragged that they would only hire the best students from top universities. Now they have hired people just because they have successfully completed a Udacity course, have college dropouts amongst their ranks, you name it. That is a pretty dramatic shift in such a short time, and they're not the only company to follow in those footsteps.
It is not that mail-order education was impossible years ago, but nobody would have taken it seriously. There was a strong leaning that a college degree from a traditional school was the only way to make it. Without that, you were going to flipping burgers at McDonalds.
I think people are now ready for new ways of learning and it just happens that the web is now a great way to distribute that education.
[+] [-] robbiemitchell|13 years ago|reply
Unfortunately, most students in this world have shamefully little access to quality education. Access is definitely a problem.
Even well-funded education systems have limited access to the best possible resources. The best resources are scattered everywhere, from Stanford professors to worksheets on some teacher's desk in Idaho. Getting them online is a big step.
[+] [-] carlsednaoui|13 years ago|reply
It is pretty incredible to know that learning a topic of interest is literally a few clicks away...
Also, on another note, it could be that since my cost as a student is almost zero (let's take the value of my time out of the equation) then I am more willing to "try" a class and, since the Udacity classes tend to be engaging, I actually stick around.
Edit: IMO Udacity is a great way to start learning something new, such as basic CS stuff.
[+] [-] brown9-2|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tom_b|13 years ago|reply
Less obviously, I think that mentors (teachers and professors at all levels) who provide value to individual learners will stay in high demand, along with the institutions that employ them. I also think that the personal networks of these mentors will become the gateway to top-level employment in many fields.
[+] [-] geogra4|13 years ago|reply
I decided to sign up for an O'Reilly School of Technology course instead. Yes it's not free, but I fee like I am actually learning something.
[+] [-] karpathy|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] carlsednaoui|13 years ago|reply
The Udacity classes are very informative and relatively engaging (love the lecture quizzes), however, I do believe that there is still a lot of room for improvements.
On another note, I am pretty excited about the upcoming local Udacity Meetups (http://udacity.meetup.com/).
[+] [-] leal|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Shenglong|13 years ago|reply
You meet the people who are going to find you that dream job. If you're an entrepreneur, you find the people who you'll want working for/with you. You meet the people who'll help you get things done.
The question here really shouldn't be about whether Udacity is a good educational model. It should be about how far it can go - and I absolutely do not believe it is a replacement for traditional "higher education".
[+] [-] randomdata|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] neilparikh|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nickc1188|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Corvus|13 years ago|reply
“Any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word 'no'”
[+] [-] trevor99|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] UK-AlasGou|13 years ago|reply
Courses should not be "watered down". They should be as hard as they are at top universities, other wise they will lose credibility.
Do primer courses, leading on to the harder courses if you have to.
This revolution should be used to make high-end knowledge available to everyone who seeks it, not to water-down that knowledge. I want online courses, but good ones which are comparable to top courses.