Stanford Free Classes – A review from a Stanford Student

tldr; The experts make it look impossible but the masters make it look easy and actually teach you

Just ranting out here so feel free to ignore :-)

This is not really aimed at the author but towards the "elite" group. There was another elite commentator in one of the other thread who said he dropped out of ML class because This course included gems such as "if you don't know what a derivative is, that is fine" and he thought math was important in ML. Before the ML class I could not even argue with these guys because I did not know squat about AI and talking to these experts their advice was to take a year off and learn math and then start learning AI which in my case was not possible. Today after a couple of months of online classes I am actually using ML in my daily work and its not magic that only the elite with deep profound math knowledge can use. Another programmer who is working in khan academy actually had a blog post about how he implemented ML by learning from Prof Andrew's class now that is real world impact. I may be missing something but can one of you experts please explain why you need deep math knowledge when the professor who has been doing a lot of research in this field a lot more than you does not think so ?. The professor in his classes keeps reassuring that even after using it for so many years he has difficulty in the subject but I'm guessing these experts know it all :-).

This is the reason in my opinion even though wall street is full of smart people they do not care about the rest of the population or the general masses the attitude is we are smart and we can do what we want you guys are dumb and deserve what you get and if someone outside of their elite group starts talking their language they do not like it.

On a similar note when you look at the people complaining about khan academy most of them are these so called smart people.

Let me talk about my background I have been working as a programmer for around 11 years , no math background though thought myself math by using Khan academy and before my layoff (now am working on my own startup ) used to make 90K (in a southern state).

So guys you are not the center of the world we are crashing into your fraternity you are no longer the only experts who can talk about ML , the guys at stanford are smarter than you and know what they are doing and FYI they don't need you its the other way around. Another interesting thing is that mostly the current students seem to agree with the author, If you are smart you should probably take the effort to learn more rather than asking them to tailor the classes to what you think matters . Also ask yourself this question if you were the Professor what do you think is more satisfying teaching 40 full time students or 20000 who are in the field already and make more impact in the field ?.

Nope. My background is in engineering so the calculus wasn't an issue, but my stats knowledge was really weak.

My impression was that the course was designed to give someone with little or no background in machine learning a maximally useful amount of practically relevant information given a multitude of constraints (ergo the focus on Andrew Ng's favourite implementation tricks of the trade, learning curves &c.; each of dozens of such nuggets having the potential to save days, weeks or even months in real projects).

If that was indeed the goal, the endeavour should, in my opinion, be considered an amazing success.

An easy way to make the assignments harder (and maybe more fulfilling), if you have the time, might be to ignore much of the handholding (e.g. by porting everything to a very different programming environment).

Ideally, online courses like that would be "infinite" and personalized, giving everyone as much depth (and breadth!) as desired (with a "baseline" approximately equal to the 2011 class) and taking existing knowledge into account.

Eventually, we'll all get our Primer!

Really principles be damned, they are doing it for free

I don't mean to imply that schools should be in it for the $$$. I get your point. But costs are an issue. A big issue. And right now student tuitions shoulder a large part of that burden.

Stanford's total enrollment is about 20,000 students. $35,000 per year = $700,000,000.

Offer 16 new online courses which yields 20,000 students per course taking a $99 final exam. $31,680,000. Less than 5% of annual tuition-based revenue. That's a new library without hitting the endowment fund, underwriting existing salaries, funding pension obligations, or adding a new facility dedicated solely to the production of online educational content.

I think Leland and Jane Stanford would be proud to know that the memorial they built to their son is today moving in the direction of educating millions worldwide.

It's okay to "be strong and stay strong and while being of benefit to others."