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Comment by ikeboy | Hacker News Reader

>Goel and his teaching assistants receive more than 10,000 questions a semester from students on the course's online forum.

Is this normal?

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Not 10,000 questions, 10,000 messages: http://www.news.gatech.edu/2016/05/09/artificial-intelligenc...

That article says ~300 students, 30 posts each seems pretty normal.

So the original article:

1. Didn't mention it was an online course

2. Didn't mention there were 300 students

3. Claimed it was questions instead of posts

I don't think 1 and 2 are very important for the story, and the questions/posts thing seems like an honest mistake. No harm done. The meaning is basically the same, since the bot can presumably reply to any post, not just a top level question.

No! I've done a 300 person electronics class and we've gotten about 300 questions with a handful of people who ask the bulk of our questions.

I think that figure likely includes all contributions, not just questions. I took this same class in Summer 2015, and there are 1036 posts[0] and 11074 contributions[1] on the online forum for that class. The number of students is similar (370 in my class, 302 last semester).

[0] posts are questions and notes

[1] contributions are posts, responses, edits, followups, and comments to followups (i.e., everything)

The article got the numbers wrong, but that course was especially active when I took it, and I was taking it the second time it was offered. Still the best course in the OMSCS program that I've taken. Very lively, helpful and deep discussions, some of which had individual responses going into thousands of words.

The course itself was very innovative in its directions and tests because it asked questions that compared and contrasted human and artificial intelligence. That not just got people's creative juices going, but also made it relatable. More than one person related the artificial learning we were imparting to the code with our own learning processes - or that of our children.

The instructors (Dr.Goel and Dr.Joyner) also used it as a chance to compare the online vs on-campus versions of the course with some interesting results (tldr: the online version was OOM better due to student participation, which was likely due to self-selection of early adopters of the OMSCS program, but still worthwhile).

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