Fortnightly Mailing

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

(Other posts tagged ai-course.)

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

Last week's report focused mainly on the midterm exam, and on a conversation with Sebastian Thrun. This report conments on the midterm exam and reflects on the way the course has run this week.

First, some comments on the midterm exam

1. According to information just received from Sebastian Thrun, 23k students passed the midterm, with 85% currently falling into the B+ range.

2. There was a surprising amount of post-exam discussion between students about the substance of the exam. There was some whingeing, but not much given the very large numbers on the course.  The interesting discussion fell into three categories:

How economic inequality harms societies - Richard Wilkinson's July 2011 TED talk

With thanks to Mick Fletcher

I am glad that Richard Wilkinson got to speak at TED Global, and below is the 16 minute talk in full. For more about his and Kate Pickett's influential book "The Spirit Level" go to The Equality Trust.

The shape of the next phase of online learning

Stephen Downes points to a 9 November 2011 Educause piece by Jarret Cummings and writes:

"I think the shape of the next phase of online learning is being defined: reliance on open educational resources, supported by some sort of automated, analytics based and competency based testing mechanism."

Yes.

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

(Other posts tagged ai-course.)

Substantial  changes made to A3 and small changes made to A5 and A7 below, 21 November 2011, and to introductory paragraph, 23 November 2011. [For visitors from the Aiqus discussion about student numbers, note that more light is shed on the "YouTube video counts question" - a distracting side-issue - in paragraph seven of report number two, 18 October 2011.]

Here is my seventh participant's report from the Stanford Introduction to Artificial Intelligence course. It is in three parts. A is the report proper. B picks up on a pre-arranged call from Sebastian Thrun. C lists further free CS courses that will be available from Stanford University in January 2012.

A - Report

1. A lighter week from the point of view of studying, because the last week saw less material presented, to allow students time to prepare for the midterm "examination", aka the midterm.

Using AI in formative and summative assessment

[Decided to remove image of scratch pad shortly after publishing this.]

In September 2007 I had a personally revelatory moment concerning how AI (as I now know it to be) might be used to provide formative feedback for learners. It stemmed from being involved in running the 2007 ALT conference at which Dylan Wiliam and Peter Norvig each gave keynote speeches. With Richard Noss (who now directs the ESRC/EPSRC funded TEL programme) we set up a Google Doc "scratch pad" to gather a shortlist of issues that could be worth examining. Not a lot (well, nothing!) came from it, as is often the way.

Doing the Stanford AI course (see also my piece in ALT News Online) has sensitised me to current work on the same thing.

Here are some examples. If you know of others, please post them as comments and I will collate them.

• How Khan Academy is using machine learning to assess student mastery, November 2011 piece by David Hu.
• The elements of e-assessment, 2011 article by Sophie White of the examining body OCR (Oxford, Cambridge and RSA Examinations).
• Edexcel chief puts hi-tech agenda to the test, 2010 TES article about developments in Pearson's examining body Edexcel.
• Massive scale data mining for education, November 2010 piece by Greg Linden in Communications of the ACM (via PN).
• Computer analysis of test-takers' answers to standarised tests is revealing cheats, May 2011 article in the Economist mentioning the "relentless logic of combinatorial statistics". [Thanks to DM for the link.]

ALT-C 2011 keynote and invited speaker videos

Here are the playlists for videos of keynote and invited speaker sessions from the 2011, 2010, and 2009 Association for Learning Technology conferences. Below is a selection from the 2011 conference. Hat tip to Darren Moon and Danny Blandy for the snazzy ALT-branded opening and closing "indents". At the time of writing, less than five days after publication, John Naughton's talk had been viewed over 7,000 times . [Disclosure: I work half time for ALT.]

1 2
1 - "The educational and social impacts of Plan Ceibal -- a new approach to the use of technology in education" by Miguel Brechner
2 - "The elusive technological future" by John Naughton

3 4
3 - "I Have a Blind Student in My Maths/Science Class, Should I panic? How to promote inclusion for blind students" by Dónal Fitzpatrick
4 - "On being public...how social media reshapes professional identity" by Anne-Marie Cunningham

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

(Other posts tagged ai-course.)

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

I'll split this report into two sections.

Firstly, some points about course organisation.

Last week's attempt to run an "office hours" session in real time did not work. In substitution for it, two short videos have been published with Peter Norvig and Sebastian Thrun responding informally to the most voted on questions submitted by students prior to the session.  More such recordings will follow.  I've embedded the videos below because they:

• give a lay person some sense of why the AI field is important and interesting; 
• contain pointers to what may be coming next from Norvig and Thrun by way of further online courses.

Note the explicit references to the course team's intention to:

• develop a course at a more introductory level than the current one;
• get to grips with extracting meaning from the data that is being collected about, for example, learners' use of the materials and, I am assuming, the relationships between things like use and progress. 

(The two sessions - do not be deceived by their very similar "thumbnails" - are respectively 13 and 8.5 minutes long.)

ALT News Online article about the Stanford online AI course

(Other posts tagged ai-course.)

Here is a link to an article I wrote about the Stanford course - What Can We Learn From Stanford University’s Free Online Computer Science Courses? - that was included in the November issue of ALT News Online. [Disclosure - I work half time for ALT.]

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

The paths of blindfolded walkers trying to walk in a straight line in overcast (blue) and sunlit (yellow) conditions. From Unit 8.2 of Introduction to Artificial Intelligence course.

 

(Other posts tagged ai-course.)

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

1. I'd finished the work before I noticed that, unannounced, the order of the course had been changed from that shown in the originally published outline.  Thus units on Representation with Logic, and Planning, taught by Peter Norvig, have come before the originally scheduled units on Hidden Markov Models and Bayes Filters.

2. This change of order probably explains why this week's study felt somewhat disconnected from last week's,  a fact emphasised by a change of teacher from Sebastian Thrun to Peter Norvig. Thrun, it has to be said has a less austere and more down-to-earth presence than Norvig, whose delivery style is dry and very concentrated. Underlying this, I think Norvig's material on propositional logic and on mathematical representations of plans is by its nature relatively abstract: and for me this spells trouble, being someone who has always tended to struggle with the abstract. 

3. The advice I'd give from a course design point of view is to further strengthen the illustrations as to why these kinds of abstraction matter.  The video from which the picture above is taken a good example of this:

4. Secondly this kind of more abstract content needs more rather than less use of "dialogic" check questions, as has been the case in other units of the course. To illustrate this point here are the contents-lists of Units 4 and Units 8. Check-questions are indicated by ?. 12 sets of check questions out of 21 sections is a much more promising ratio than 3 out of 22.

5. During the last week Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig ran an online "office hours" session using a Google Plus "Hangout". I was not around to try to join this, but from Thrun's "We apologize for the large number of people who were denied participation in the online office hours via youtube. We had a lively discussion which was recorded on video - mostly on topics beyond this course (e.g., what are great research topics). We will soon post the video on this site. Apologies again. Technical problems with the Hangout-Youtube link." it looks as if this was a partial success. I think this is a "forgivable" issue, given the very large number of people who will have attempted to take part in it.  

6. Next week I hope to find out whether and if yes by how much the participation rate has changed, as measured by the submission of homework for weeks 3 and 4.