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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

#71

Post by diiq »

nessus42 wrote: post #61
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 could not disagree more. I have an MIT degree, and I thought it was remarkably refreshing to have the difficult made easy, rather than vice versa. Not that I have huge complaints with my MIT education, but having taken some classes at Harvard too, where the emphasis was sometimes different, I can appreciate that there's often a great deal of value in a class that can draw people in and make them interested, rather…

I agree totally. The first two sins of education are making simple things complicated and making complicated things simple. Ng was clear, and that is commendable. My concern was not based on how difficult he made the material he presented seem. I was concerned that he did not present more difficult material.

Vocabulary is very important. But in addition to knowing the meanings of words, its important to know why concepts are carved up the way they are. Why divide the world into supervised and unsupervised --- what does carving at that joint win us?

Getting people interested is what the first week is for. The other eight, I feel, should try to satisfy the curiosity the first week sparked.

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

#72

Post by clyfe »

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…

> khan academy actually had a blog post about how he implemented ML

I belive that this might be the article in question:

http://david-hu.com/2011/11/02/how-khan-academy-is-using-mac...

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

#73

Post by tonio09 »

nessus42 wrote: post #61
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 could not disagree more. I have an MIT degree, and I thought it was remarkably refreshing to have the difficult made easy, rather than vice versa. Not that I have huge complaints with my MIT education, but having taken some classes at Harvard too, where the emphasis was sometimes different, I can appreciate that there's often a great deal of value in a class that can draw people in and make them interested, rather…

I'm taking a Masters Machine Learning class at a top UK university and I must say that I'm sure the lecturer is an expert in ML but he's got absolutely no teaching skills. 90% of the class has absolutely no idea what's going on, and the 10% has extensive previous ML experience. Professor Ng's lectures are like a life savor to me. They help me understand the basic concepts of ML so that I can go on and study in the deep waters.

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

#74

Post by sausagefeet »

restofus wrote: post #45
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…

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 bigc…

Of course the guy who came up with it taught himself, there was nobody to teach him. The point of a college is to speed a lot of this up, though, and tell you the results these people got and how and the implications. I think you're drawing a bigger contrast between what we said than I intended. I'm not saying that Applied courses are wrong or should not exist. I have taken several in my day because I just don't have the mental discipline to learn a lot of theory all the time. What I am saying is that I don't think really smart people complaining about not getting enough out of the course is not a matter of them thinking they are elite but that they just want more and don't see the point in wasting time on something that won't give it to them. My favorite classes in college were always the ones that required a lot of theory and a lot of rigor because it brought so much more together for me (even though I often didn't really understand it), I think a the elite you speak of probably have similar feelings.

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

#75

Post by nessus42 »

diiq wrote: post #71
nessus42 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I could not disagree more. I have an MIT degree, and I thought it was remarkably refreshing to have the difficult made easy, rather than vice versa. Not that I have huge complaints with my MIT education, but having taken some classes at Harvard too, where the emphasis was sometimes different, I can appreciate that there's often a great deal of value in a class that can draw people in and make them interested, rather…

I agree totally. The first two sins of education are making simple things complicated and making complicated things simple. Ng was clear, and that is commendable. My concern was not based on how difficult he made the material he presented seem . I was concerned that he did not present more difficult material. Vocabulary is very important. But in addition to knowing the meanings of words, its important to know why con…

Vocabulary is very important. But in addition to knowing the meanings of words, its important to know why concepts are carved up the way they are. Why divide the world into supervised and unsupervised --- what does carving at that joint win us?

I'm not sure that I get you. Why we have both supervised and unsupervised algorithms was made pretty clear to me in the class. And just what more difficult material would you have liked to seen? The real Stanford class is made more difficult largely by doing lots of difficult math proofs. I emphatically disagree with any assertion that this free class should be so math heavy. What would be the purpose of that for the intended audience? Sure, such work would make fine extra credit, but making effective use of algorithms rarely relies on on a ability to mathematically prove that they have the properties that they do.

I think that a big final project, as is required in the real Stanford class, on the other hand, would have a lot of utility for the intended audience. But as that would be impossible to automatically grade, that's a non-starter.

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

#76

Post by jacobquick »

This kid's a...kid, I guess we shouldn't expect a long view from him. What he sees as a slippery slope is a normal part of education that's hard to spot if you're only in the system for four years.

Professors have been complaining for decades that students don't start their classes with the basics already down. Making a video version of this class, even one that only teaches the first half of the real class, means the professors will start to expect the students know that part already and the real class will expand to include even more advanced topics.

There's no danger of Stanford or Harvard or MIT or anyone else making things easy on their undergrads.

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

#77

Post by eldina »

Jun8 wrote: post #25

He says: "Stanford “free” classes aren’t free. Stanford students have to pay for them. The fact that I’m paying for them doesn’t bother me, the fact that people who aren’t paying for them have changed the class more than the ones who have, does." which does seem to be a forceful point. However, checking the FAQ ( http://see.stanford.edu/see/faq.aspx#aboutq2 ) we find that they are funded completely from outside sourc…

Perhaps some of the funds raised for these open classes could and would have been raised for other projects relating to proper Stanford students ?

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

#79

Post by brudolph »

gfodor wrote: post #69

There are two goals with learning ML: - Applying known ML algorithms to a real world task - Coming up with new ML algorithms and research It turns out (ahem) that the first goal, applying ML, is not only much, much higher in demand than the second goal, but is also much, much easier to teach than the content required to pursue the second. This dichotomy is the reason the split between CS229a and CS229 in both content…

I'm sorry if I made it confusing, but it really isn't about whether I signed up for 229 or 229a, the point is most of my classes for the coming term are now under this new online format and it would be shame to see them lower their standards to fit the public.

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

#80

Post by DennisP »

kenjackson wrote: post #30

It's unclear to me if this guy didn't learn enough or if it just wasn't hard enough. I do personally think that some courses are hard for the sake of being hard. If he learned the material stated in the syllabus and it was easy, then that's a really great thing and a tribute to the teaching.

Some courses are hard for the sake of being hard, because they are intended to filter out students who can't hack it. The degree is proof that you had the intelligence and determination to earn it.

When you're not awarding a degree anyway, that consideration is irrelevant, and the only requirement is to teach as clearly and effectively as you can.

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