Second report from the Norvig/Thrun/Stanford/Know Labs Artificial Intelligence course

Screenshot from AI Course Unit 2, Topic 34, Note on Implementation

(Other posts tagged ai-course.)

Final paragraph updated 18/10/2011, and 23/11/2011

Here is my second participant's report from the Stanford Introduction to Artificial Intelligence course.

1. Over the last week I worked through the second section of the course - Problem Solving - consisting of nearly 40 short, low-tech videos. I described the pleasing, quirky, design of these in the first report.

2. Here you can review the Problem Solving materials, without being logged into the course. If you click on "cc" in the video-control bar you will see how the videos have been captioned and translated in multiple languages (by volunteers, using the dotSUB platform).

3. The course uses an interesting (and to my mind mostly effective) way of integrating multiple choice questions into the flow of the presentations, such that you sometimes feel as if you are in a one-to-one tutorial. Here, for example, is how this method is used in course's section on a search method called A*.  (The subject-matter is not important: it is the way that very short video clips are interspersed with questions step-by-step that I've not seen before.)

4. Various corrections have been made to the materials based on learner-feedback. Example.

5. Those undertaking the "advanced" course track are offered a series of multiple choice homework tasks (7 this week), which can be done and redone up until a deadline. There is no feedback cconcerning the "correctness" of one's answers, and presently there is no indication as to the form that any feedback will take, other than that it will not be individualised. Personally I have found it very difficult to judge the "level" at which the homework questions are being pitched (some seemed trivially simple, and others more challenging). I suspect I have treated some of them as if they are simpler than is in fact the case.

6. In the period since the homework tasks were published, several clarifying updates to several of the tasks have appeared, stemming from questions raised by learners. This is an indication that the homework tasks have probably not been tested much prior to release. 

7. The Twitter channel for the course contains mainly informative updates; and today the channel stated that in the past 24 hours [14-15 October] 80,000 students had worked on class materials, and according to KnowLab's David Stavens, about 50,000 people completed the first week's homework by the deadline - hence the strike-through on the following. [Note that YoutTube is not thought to publish counts of views from embedded autoplay videos.]  It will be possible to judge this a bit more independently from YouTube download figures,  once the deadline for the submission of homework has passed. Certainly, with over 100,000 people are enrolled on the course, ~24 hours before the submission deadline (and even with the kind of high drop-out rate that a free course of this kind - with no entry filters - is likely to have, and even if a very large number of people are leaving the homework to the last minute) I would have expected the final homework task to have had many more than the 466 views showing at 22:00 GMT on 15 October:

Screenshot from AI Course Homework 1, Question 7, A* Search