Well, first off, there was the fact that the "whiteboard" consisted of them writing on notebook paper. Had this been the only shortcoming, it would have been fine, but seriously, there are so many better ways to present something on a computer screen than writing in a notebook under a camera.

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.