Why Stanford's Free Online Education Experiment Is Booming - Education - GOOD

[Anthony Perritano]

http://www.good.is/post/why-stanford-s-free-online-education-experiment-is-booming/

The artifical intelligence course is taught by the guy who made the google self driving car, but that one is full. 

I am going to try the HCI course by Scott Kemper. it starts soon. Any educoders want to join?

http://www.hci-class.org/

-Tony

[Stian Håklev]

I've joined... wonder when it's starting though, it keeps getting pushed forwards... 

It will be interesting how this plays out - now there are two companies, Coursera and Udacity which both are trying to benefit from this. Sebastian Thrun resigned from tenure at Stanford to start Udacity, 

I think it's really interesting to contrast how MIT OCW was initially launched to how the Stanford Open Courses were: http://startupjedi.org/2012/01/30/stanfords-coursera-lean-startup-university/ ... MIT started with a bold proclamation from the provost, lot's of media, an all out project by the entire faculty over years etc... Whereas Stanford is more like a "lean startup", throwing one or two courses out there, seeing what floats or sinks, rapidly adjusting and innovating etc... Too bad University of Toronto could never be nimble enough to do anything like this... (or bold enough to do anything like MIT OCW :)

Stian

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http://reganmian.net/blog -- Random Stuff that Matters

[Armin Krauss]

Yeah, if UofT offers free courses it is already mainstream :(

[Priscilla Jiménez P.]

Yeap..I already joined the course, just waiting for it.

- Best Regards

Priscilla.

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[Colin McCann]

I've joined as well

2012/1/30 Priscilla Jiménez P. <priscilla...@gmail.com>

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Colin

[mike tissenbaum]

me too - also the one on online business dev

[Rebecca Cober]

Ha! That's funny - I signed up last week too... I wonder when it will start?

[Anthony Perritano]

thats great we can all do it together. I guess the response was over whelming and they are re-tooling. 
-Tony

[Anthony Perritano]

The Stanford HCI course starts today. It has been delayed since Jan-Feb. It looks like they put a lot of time into it. I have gone through the first couple of lectures and its pretty engaging. First assignment is due on Sunday. 

https://class.coursera.org/hci

--Tony

[Armin Krauss]

Worst timing every :/

[mike tissenbaum]

Yeah This course would have been awesome in Feb when I wanted to take it... but the next two weeks are a total write off :(

[Stian Håklev]

I just went through the videos for the first week. There are 7 videos, total playing time about 1:30h. The video player is really neat, I love that they have captions, and you can easily control speed etc. I found that watching it at 2x speed with captions still means I easily understand everything, but the information density is such that I don't get easily bored, and the videos are short and sweet. I can easily pause the video to take notes, or to look up some terms (like Monte Carlo simulation). Such a big difference from a 2 hour MIT OCW recording where the professor spends 15 minutes in the beginning just talking about homework and an upcoming exam :) 

However, I found the multiple choice questions quite "inane" and not very helpful, wouldn't mind turning them off if possible. Very different from the embedded Python interpreter etc in the computer science class, where you can really experiment with the different concepts as you go along. It would be interesting to brainstorm about what kinds of interactions could be offered alongside the video to help build understanding - maybe you could be building a concept map as the video progresses, or something like that. 

The content is very neat - so far it's mostly summarizing stuff I already heard about, but it's still helpful to put it all together in one overview, and I guess it'll get more detailed as we move along. I've taken two or three KMDI courses that all touched upon this subject, but so far I must say that the first week's "class" in this course was far more useful than anything I got in KMD, as far as lecture goes. (The course itself doesn't have a strong social orientation, however there are optional discussion forums, and students are self-organizing in a lot of different small communities, including language communities - will be interesting to see how active those get. We're also trying to do a small study group at P2PU: https://p2pu.org/en/groups/human-computer-interaction-at-stanford/content/week-1/?pagination_page_number=1#16907), and there are also assignments which will be sent to peers for peer-review using rubrics etc. 

There are two options for participating, you can just do all the quizzes and get a mark based on that, or you can do the studio option, where you actually have to do a project, do participant observation, create a design brief etc (very similar to what you'd have to do in a KMD class).

In fact, I think this material could be a really good basis for a "flipped" KMD course - where students watch these videos as homework, and then spend the classroom time working in groups on the design projects, discussing the ideas from the lectures, etc. 

Stian

[Stian Håklev]

PS: I just posted my own notes from week 1 here: http://reganmian.net/wiki/hci_course - not much value added over the actual videos and slides, but if you want a quick scan over what they covered in the first class, might be useful. (I only captured points useful to me, and might be restructuring this information as I go forwards).

[Anthony Perritano]

Thanks for the notes Stian good job. 

I like this course, the material is presented very well by Scott. I also like the multiple choice questions and how they are segmented throughout the lecture. Breaks it up and anchors the material a bit more.  I agree they need to be way harder and more thoughtful. and the spelling mistakes on them are horrendous. come on Stanford. 

--Tony