Sebastian Thrun wants to teach you how to program a self-driving robotic car
spectrum.ieee.org
spectrum.ieee.org
But what really got under my skin and ultimately caused me to give up on the program were the errors in the videos, and how they were dealt with – namely, by putting some correction text underneath the video on the website. This was annoying and frustrating to try to learn with even for simple errors. But it was ridiculous when the error was a single character change within three lines packed with newly introduced notation. The minimal correct way to handle this would have been simply to overlay a YouTube annotation over the incorrect text. Those would have shown up in full screen mode, and they wouldn't have required students to simultaneously mentally amend what they were watching while juggling new concepts in their heads.
I was also not thrilled when newly introduced terminology got thrown around imprecisely in some of the videos, leaving the viewer wondering what these terms actually mean, and what the teacher was actually trying to say.
I have no doubt that Thrun and Norvig are great computer scientists. But a great scientist and a good teacher are not often found in the same person. For that person to also be a good video director would have to be a miracle.
I'm not sure how they'll deal with errors--too soon to tell.
So far Sebastian has been very good about not using jargon without introducing it--in fact he's been extremely empathetic in this regard. Moreover, so far the format of the course has changed to focusing on solving the specific problem (like robot localization) and then afterwards introducing the formal ideas, like Bayes' theorem. Its much better than the videos I saw from the first AI course.
I think you're right that sometimes doers are not great teachers, but I am convinced that you should give Thrun another shot.
My biggest issue with ai-class was that in almost all the exams and homework there were quite a few very poorly phrased questions. In a human-graded exam/hw this isn't so bad since the ability to "show your work" usually allows you to misunderstand a question and demonstrate that you do understand the material. In general I though very little effort was put into creating assignments that worked well for an online environment (ml-class did this perfectly).
What's wrong with this? Handwriting looks way better on notebook paper than on a tablet or on an actual whiteboard.
The only problem with the AI courses was lack of official programming exercises and, yes, some imprecisions here and there that were not hard to resolve by checking the forums, where they were inevitably brought up and fixed.
For me, the main problem was the course was trying to attract audience without any common background. So lectures ended up very superficial unless the subject is very self contained.
For example, Novig gave a few very nice lectures introducing game theory and various search based solutions. But then they jump to a very superficial description of particle filters.
On the one hand, they dedicate time to explaining Bayes theorem (something that is taught in any basic probability class), and on the other hand, they describe advanced topics like particle filters and, perhaps, Markov Decision Processes very briefly.
Hopefully, Udacity will have, in the future, courses that build one on another. So students will have more uniform background and the instructors will have something to rely on.
Good luck, Professor Thurn!
The presentation of the content has been much improved. The "whiteboard" is now electronic, and it is still visible though the person's hand. Furthermore, I haven't noticed any errors yet - they seem to be much better at avoiding them.
The biggest improvement is that some of the quizzes now involve programming some of the concepts in Python, which IMO works really well as a teaching tool.
There is still a slight problem that people are starting at different levels, so some fairly basic concepts need to be revisited, but I imagine that will improve as Udacity offer a bigger range of courses.
But the content was fine (the bug issue did not appear that often, did it?). The sad fact is that I've had books with that information sitting at home for months, but never got round to reading it. The lectures with their weekly deadlines at least made go through with it.
I don't know why you decided to be a jerk about it.
[1]http://www.udacity-forums.com/cs373/questions/276/homework-d... [2] http://www.udacity-forums.com/cs373/questions/129/has-the-ho...
>I am against education that is only available to the top 1% of all students. I am against tens of thousands of dollars of tuition expenses. I am against the imbalance that the present system brings to the world. I want to empower the 99%. I want to democratize education. Education should be free. Accessible for all, everywhere, and any time.
When this becomes a bit bigger and mainstream, a lot of people will be interested in that space and will be ready (and happy) to pay for it, I guess. And this need not necessarily be the students: revenue could come from course sponsors (like course champions at OCW, http://ocw.mit.edu/donate/ocw-course-champions-program) or institutions who build own offers around and based on certain courses.
Regardless they picked a hard one to figure out.
It'd be great to have a simple thing for pronunciation; maybe a plug-in that lets me highlight and right click ascii ipa or even unicode ipa.