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Stanford Free Classes – A review from a Stanford Student

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Re: Stanford Free Classes – A review from a Stanford Student

#41

Post by sausagefeet »

restofus wrote: post #31

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…

This could just be an expectation problem. I think most of these free courses have that 'Applied' stuck infront of them, ok, fine. But for my education I want rigor. I don't want to just know how to use something, I want to know how the guy who came up with it figured it out and I want to be bale to prove things about it. Not having to know what a derivative is does not fit this. I don't think it's a matter of the elite thinking only elite people can grok something like ML, it's a matter of that they expect the dirty details and are annoyed when they don't get it.

Re: Stanford Free Classes – A review from a Stanford Student

#42

Post by diiq »

dantheman wrote: post #36
diiq wrote: post #20

My degree is in Fine Art, and I thought the class was pointlessly easy. Fix the class in two easy steps: Lecture live, record the lectures. EVERY speaker is more effective when they have the feedback of their audience's faces. Expect the members of the public to meet the class' standard, don't shrivel the curriculum to match the public. An applied CS course that doesn't demand programming is bizarre. Flunk everyone i…

I completely disagree, recorded lectures are nowhere as nice as the stuff that kahn and stanford are pushing out.

Fair point. I admit that Khan does an incredible job. I believe it [lecturing to a microphone] is an extremely rare and underdeveloped skill. "EVERY" might have been hyperbole.

But when the lecturers at hand are professors who have spent decades teaching to a room full of students who become visibly impatient, confused, eager, or antsy --- they should keep doing that.

To keep a pleasant rhythm to instruction, many professors tell jokes; I think it's VERY hard to tell a joke to a webcam when you are used to an audience.

Re: Stanford Free Classes – A review from a Stanford Student

#43

Post by noblethrasher »

sausagefeet wrote: post #41
restofus wrote: post #31

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…

This could just be an expectation problem. I think most of these free courses have that 'Applied' stuck infront of them, ok, fine. But for my education I want rigor. I don't want to just know how to use something, I want to know how the guy who came up with it figured it out and I want to be bale to prove things about it. Not having to know what a derivative is does not fit this. I don't think it's a matter of the el…

I know ML and have a math degree; I don't see why you'd need to know what a derivative is. If anything, I think exposure to ML and functional programming before differential calculus could be beneficial since you'd better appreciate that differentiation is just one special application (no pun intended) of the concept of higher order functions.

Re: Stanford Free Classes – A review from a Stanford Student

#44

Post by juanre »

I took the AI class, and I also saw a degradation of the difficulty. At the beginning it was great. I even undusted my old 48SX, and had lots of fun: they actually made me think. But some of the lessons towards the end were almost a joke: I sure don't need to spend time applying a trivial formula back and forth, as we did in the computer vision lessons (deriving it would have been a slightly more interesting exercise.) I don't know if Stanford students were paying for this, but I'd not be very happy if I had.

On the other hand, I am very happy that they are doing it, and I intend to take as many as my time will allow. And I wish they'll figure out a way to charge a small fee for having "Stanford" in the title in some manner, so that they don't have to spend about half of the certificate of accomplishment making sure that everybody understands that this is _not_ an actual Stanford certificate.

Re: Stanford Free Classes – A review from a Stanford Student

#45

Post by restofus »

sausagefeet wrote: post #41
restofus wrote: post #31

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…

This could just be an expectation problem. I think most of these free courses have that 'Applied' stuck infront of them, ok, fine. But for my education I want rigor. I don't want to just know how to use something, I want to know how the guy who came up with it figured it out and I want to be bale to prove things about it. Not having to know what a derivative is does not fit this. I don't think it's a matter of the el…

If you want to know how the guy came up with it , do you think someone taught him that or he delved into the topic deeper by himself and figured it out .The professor makes it clear that you can do the derivates if you know so I do not understand how the course would be better if that was given as a assignment. Also if the professor thought the same way why would he want to teach a class instead of working for a bigco or a research firm ?

Re: Stanford Free Classes – A review from a Stanford Student

#46

Post by romaniv »

restofus wrote: post #31

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…

Agree.

A lot of the things I've learned in AI class are pretty darn simple, once explained properly. So far all this knowledge has been hidden behind jargon and badly defined notations. IMO, the guys at Stanford are liberating it.

Moreover, this is the first time in my life I'm actually seeing a practical use for things like derivatives in programming I can relate to. Sure, I know there are, theoretically, lots of different applications, but I've never seen them since college. Seeing an example of a practical application makes me more interested and more likely to deepen the knowledge of the underlying math.

Re: Stanford Free Classes – A review from a Stanford Student

#47

Post by restofus »

CurtHagenlocher wrote: post #22
diiq wrote: post #20

My degree is in Fine Art, and I thought the class was pointlessly easy. Fix the class in two easy steps: Lecture live, record the lectures. EVERY speaker is more effective when they have the feedback of their audience's faces. Expect the members of the public to meet the class' standard, don't shrivel the curriculum to match the public. An applied CS course that doesn't demand programming is bizarre. Flunk everyone i…

I felt similarly dismayed about a machine learning course which doesn't demand knowledge of calculus.

I disagree I do not know calculus and would not have done this class if that was the case. I am now implementing ML in my day to day work . Anybody can make ML difficult , the greatness is in making it easy for people to use it and that makes a real world impact IMHO

Re: Stanford Free Classes – A review from a Stanford Student

#48

Post by flatline »

noblethrasher wrote: post #43
sausagefeet wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This could just be an expectation problem. I think most of these free courses have that 'Applied' stuck infront of them, ok, fine. But for my education I want rigor. I don't want to just know how to use something, I want to know how the guy who came up with it figured it out and I want to be bale to prove things about it. Not having to know what a derivative is does not fit this. I don't think it's a matter of the el…

I know ML and have a math degree; I don't see why you'd need to know what a derivative is. If anything, I think exposure to ML and functional programming before differential calculus could be beneficial since you'd better appreciate that differentiation is just one special application (no pun intended) of the concept of higher order functions.

If I recall, solving back propagation in multiple-layer perceptrons was an unsolved problem for some time, and the solution relies pretty much solely on partial differentiation. I don't know much about ML but things like neural networks were pure mathematical constructs before they were CS topics. I agree with the GP, though, you don't need to know the actual math for most of this stuff.

Re: Stanford Free Classes – A review from a Stanford Student

#49

Post by absconditus »

johnohara wrote: post #39
absconditus wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Principles be damned, there is money to be made!

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 re…

The problem is providing a questionable education and then selling a meaningless certification to make money.

These classes are also highly vulnerable to cheating and you can be sure that a large number of people will take advantage of this to pump up their resumes.

Re: Stanford Free Classes – A review from a Stanford Student

#50

Post by denzil_correa »

diiq wrote: post #20

My degree is in Fine Art, and I thought the class was pointlessly easy. Fix the class in two easy steps: Lecture live, record the lectures. EVERY speaker is more effective when they have the feedback of their audience's faces. Expect the members of the public to meet the class' standard, don't shrivel the curriculum to match the public. An applied CS course that doesn't demand programming is bizarre. Flunk everyone i…

If you were looking for recorded lectures, why would you take the CS229A online course? You should take the recorded CS229 course : http://www.academicearth.org/courses/machine-learning
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