Taking the red pill: Sebastian Thrun's candid reflection on the AI course

After a horribly embarrassing introduction, this 25 minute talk yesterday by Sebastian Thrun gives Thrun's own candid and personal reflection on last Autumn's AI course, which had 160,000 sign-ups (nearly 100,000 of whom were on the advanced track), 46,000 submitters of the first homework, 23,000 submitters of the mid-term exam, and 20,000 who completed the final exam.

Highlights of the talk:

• the large drop-out rate from the lectures on the same course at Stanford, with students preferring to use the free video-based version;
• a volunteer army of ~2000 translators;
• individual feedback from students in terrible places in the world or under big social pressure who completed the course;
• Thrun's own epiphany concerning the wrongness of "weeder" classes;
• Thrun's decision not to teach by lecture at Stanford again and instead to concentrate his efforts on a private venture-capital funded initiative called Udacity, whose online courses will be free.

Udacity aims to enrol 500,000 students on its first two courses: CS101- Building a search engine; CS373 - Programming a robotic car.

My own and others' reports from the AI course.

Comments

[Dick Moore]

Seb

Thank you for posting on this, there is so much to gain from listening to the points made in this talk, it challenges with evidence so much orthodoxy that it should be brought to the attention of as many people of influence shaping educational systems as possible.

It would also be better if the introduction could be removed

Astonishing stuff.