A student's evaluation of Stanford's massive, free, online courses

I wrote a couple of blog posts about Stanford's experiment with massive, free online classes when they were announced. The courses are now over, and Ben Rudolph, a Stanford student who took one of them on campus, has written a blog post describing his experience.

The basic format of the class was: watch 5-6 short (~10 minute) videos with interspersed review questions and complete a programming assignment each week.

Rudolph thought the video lectures were excellent, but found the programming exercises and review questions too simple. It seems the programming exercises were simplified so that they could be graded automatically and, while he found that the review questions helped him refresh what he had learned, "they hardly ever asked anything that the lecture didn’t explicitly state."

(This is not surprising, since making up short answer questions that require thinking and deduction is very difficult).

The bottom line is that he considered the course to be easier than other Stanford computer science classes he had taken.

There has been lively discussion of his post on his blog and others. I would particularly recommend that you read Debating the ‘Flipped Classroom’ at Stanford, which includes the reaction of Andrew Y. Ng, the professor who taught the course, to Rudolph's criticism.

Open online classes starting soon at Stanford – 130,000 students in one class

Stanford's experiment with free, online classes for thousands of students is getting under way. They are offering online sections of three undergraduate computer science courses:  Introduction to Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Databases.

The classes are organized around blogs, as shown here. The lectures, assignments, exams, forums, course materials, quick guides to software and optional exercises are the same whether you are online or on campus.

I took a similarly open course a few years ago from the Harvard Law School. There were three groups of students -- regular law students on campus, an extension class, which met in Second Life, and an open section for those listening to podcasts. I was in the third group, and enjoyed it very much.

The Stanford class is more highly structured and the experience of the online students will be closer to that of the on-campus students than was the case at Harvard. Also, Stanford's online students will receive a certificate of completion, showing their relative rank in the class if they complete the full course.  There was neither social media support nor formal feedback at Harvard.

Others who have offered massive, open online courses (MOOCs) are generally positive, but they report some problems with privacy and spamming and rude behavior.  Since Stanford will allow open students to take exams and do assignments, there is also the possibility of cheating. (When you enroll, you agree to abide by an honor code).

The Stanford courses are unique in several ways. They are large.  The AI class has over 130.000 students from 190 countries.  Stanford will grade and rank open students who choose to be graded. Most earlier MOOCs have been on educational technology, but these are standard academic courses offered by well-known experts in their fields. They will also be using newly developed tools. The AI course is offered in partnership with a start-up called Know Labs, but, for now, there is no information about their tools on their Web site.

This is a bold experiment -- what are the implications for future undergraduate education if these and other experiments with MOOCs succeed?

For links to and discussion of other MOOCs:

• MOOC.ca
• Wikipedia

Free, online Intro to AI from Stanford University

Stanford University CS 221 Introduction to to AI will be offered free online this fall.

The lectures will be online and all students will use the same materials, do the same assignments and take the same exams. Non-Stanford students will receive a completion letter showing where they fall on the grading curve. Over 10.000 students had requested information in the first three days after the course was announced. The instructors hope they can handle 10s or 100s of thousand students using tools like Google Moderator to select questions for discussion. I am curious to see how this and other very large online courses work out.