I'd take a good book over this any day.
Luckily it's not either/or!
OpenClassroom: Free video courses from Stanford University
41–50 of 65 posts
Re: OpenClassroom: Free video courses from Stanford University
#42I really respect Stanford's willingness to share content for free. They seem to have let go of the elitist notion of the past wherein content is worth so much to universities. This feels like they actually want people to learn.
I think there is a certain amount of strategy behind this policy. By giving away top class lectures for free you destroy the market for 99% of the universities that aren't MIT/Stanford/CM etc.
You still have more people that want come to you and pay your fees than you can accept - but in the future they might not have a cheaper tier university as an alternative.
It's like Oxford publishing the OED. Even if you didn't make money from the book - whats it worth to your selling other courses overseas?
Re: OpenClassroom: Free video courses from Stanford University
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
> What will not be sustainable anymore is a career in education where one gives essentially the same lecture for 30 years but gets paid as if he has created an entirely new lecture every year. // It will be interesting to see how this affects the development of subjects like mathematics. Without the income from teaching students how will the capitalist system maintain academics in research? Who will pay if education…
Math is probably the subject least at risk. Every prospective engineer or scientist needs to learn a lot of math, and a significant fraction of those students will be unable to master the subject by simply watching videos. That means that there will always be a significant demand for real, live math teachers.
Agreed. 1-on-1 teaching seems to be very useful to many students especially for math. $20/hr. math tutors fill the tables at my local public library.
Re: OpenClassroom: Free video courses from Stanford University
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
> What will not be sustainable anymore is a career in education where one gives essentially the same lecture for 30 years but gets paid as if he has created an entirely new lecture every year. // It will be interesting to see how this affects the development of subjects like mathematics. Without the income from teaching students how will the capitalist system maintain academics in research? Who will pay if education…
Math is probably the subject least at risk. Every prospective engineer or scientist needs to learn a lot of math, and a significant fraction of those students will be unable to master the subject by simply watching videos. That means that there will always be a significant demand for real, live math teachers.
I'm not sure about that. Certainly the need to learn math will remain reasonably constant, but I think you underestimate the ability of technology. Once we get high quality explanations that remove most bugs before they form, and practice questions that expose problems quickly (it wouldn't be too difficult to design a program to choose which problems each student should be given), and some sort of weak siri-level AI that can watch the student working to discover what they understand ... when all that happens, the demand for maths teachers/tutors will be very low. I suspect that a single qualified teacher could service 400 students.
EDIT to add: the problem with human tutors is that they are inconvenient. It takes time to schedule a tutor, and you can only get help at certain times (that is, during the tutoring session). Human tutors have many advantages, but a program that is merely passable will nevertheless be immensely popular simply because it is convenient.
Re: OpenClassroom: Free video courses from Stanford University
#45There are tens of thousands of students taking these courses. There's probably a business opportunity here. How could a startup make money by hiring, say, one hundred of the best Machine Learning graduates?
the Machine Learning class (at least for the Stanford students) also has a project component, so I'm sure a startup could see some use even from just having the graduates work on their problems for a research project, if nothing else! personally, I ended up doing two projects last year with data from my previous internship, and I think it's a great way to both have interesting problems and useful results.
I'm somewhat sad that the ML course project isn't an option available to the online students. I know there's no way something like that could scale, but I'd still like to have more validation that I know what I'm talking about than 'yes, you can answer ?'s and do programming assignments.'
When he found out I'm taking this course (he's a Stanford alum from the 90's), the CEO of ThisOrThat, the startup I work for, was really excited. He said I could use production data for a project if necessary, and gave me some ideas for possible ML applications that would be really helpful to have on the site (fraud detection, a reputation system, etc). I'm looking forward to this more than anything I did in college or grad school, and I actually feel like I'm on the young side of 25 again.
Even so, I'd really like having someone who groks ML giving me pointers after the fact. 3 months just doesn't seem like enough time to do a thorough dive into the material for me to say with confidence "I understand the background and problems in the field of ML".
Re: OpenClassroom: Free video courses from Stanford University
#46403 Forbidden
It's down? I hope it will be back soon.
Re: OpenClassroom: Free video courses from Stanford University
#47The content seems to have been removed, as it's now a 404 link. Does anyone knows if the content has been place somewhere else, or simply removed (temporary?).
I checked it earlier, it seems to have some nice topics through.
Re: OpenClassroom: Free video courses from Stanford University
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bump. In the past, I've been through Stanford's IOS dev course and ML course (via iTunes). Currently, I'm doing the AI course. It is truly amazing that Stanford is giving away this content for free. As an academic, it makes me wondering how education will change over the next 10 years. If a prof gives a fantastic lecture in the Fall of 2010, does he need to repeat himself in 2011? I had the experience of lecturing an…
I'm taking the ML class and Dr. Ng occasionally mentions in the videos how he talks to Silicon Valley start-ups to helped them implement algorithms. What if the future professor not only make his money from teaching at a university but by consulting with businesses? She would just be using her expertise to teach in a different area. There's often a disconnect between academia and business that doesn't make a lot of s…
Andrew Ng (along with Sebastian Thrun) are both working for Google (on driverless cars).
Re: OpenClassroom: Free video courses from Stanford University
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
the Machine Learning class (at least for the Stanford students) also has a project component, so I'm sure a startup could see some use even from just having the graduates work on their problems for a research project, if nothing else! personally, I ended up doing two projects last year with data from my previous internship, and I think it's a great way to both have interesting problems and useful results.
I'm somewhat sad that the ML course project isn't an option available to the online students. I know there's no way something like that could scale, but I'd still like to have more validation that I know what I'm talking about than 'yes, you can answer ?'s and do programming assignments.' When he found out I'm taking this course (he's a Stanford alum from the 90's), the CEO of ThisOrThat, the startup I work for, was…
I definitely agree with your last point - part of the reason why I decided to take a machine learning class again from Prof. Ng was because I still had a sense of unease that I wasn't quite getting the topics that would really be important when I'd implement machine learning algorithms (whatever they end up being).
Mostly though, I'm just hoping I can find a place to work with plenty of ML people to learn from :)
Re: OpenClassroom: Free video courses from Stanford University
#50Seems to be down temporarily:
Fedora Core Test Page
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