20 May 2012 rkrishnan   » (Journeyer)

My recent experiences with online courses

Last year, when the online AI Class was announced by Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig, I was thrilled and immediately signed up. Soon two other courses were offered. At work, I do low level software and have not formally studied AI or Databases or Machine Learning, not did I really see a need, in immediate future, to apply them in my job. Neverthless, I was thrilled at the possibility to hear and work with Stanford professors through these courses and enrolled for the AI course.

The AI class started and I think I could keep up my motivation level for the first 3 or 4 units. There were others distractions like family and work. I had to do a bit to extra work to learn some background mathematics and also read up the text to keep up with the lectures. Somehow, at that point of time, it all couldn’t fit together in my scheme of things, so I decided to discontinue. When I think back, I think I could have completed the course with a bit of extra effort, which I was not really putting at that point of time, instead I came up with some excuses! One of my cynical friends had predicted that I and some others at work who enrolled with me would all discontinue the course and I was sad that he was right.

Then the creation of Coursera and Udacity were announced. When I saw the announcement for the Design and analysis of Algorithms - 1 course from Stanford, I was extremely thrilled. I had always wanted to learn about analysis of algorithms but have never taken a formal course. I enrolled for the course and started working on the lectures. Tim Roughgarden, who was the lecturer for the course was going at a bit fast rate than what I could keep up. But somehow I caught up with lectures by working on them late nights and early mornings. I took notes as I went along. Taking notes meant, I had to watch the same lecture two or three times in some cases. It quickly blew up the time required to complete one week worth of lectures and sometime spilled over to the next week. But for me, it was liking playing a game. The problem sets and programming assignments were staggered by a week and so I could submit them on time. I was looking forward to the lectures and what new stuff Tim is going to throw at us, students. I did not find much time to participate in the forums. The programming assignments were mostly easy and was something I was really looking forward to. I used Racket for my programs and turned out that some others taking the course were also using Racket. It was a joy to program in Racket through out the course. During the last week of the course, I was with my parents and didn’t have a working Internet connection. After struggling with the phone company and wasting a lot of time on it, I decided to download the vides from elsewhere and work offline. In the end, I used my phone to connect to the Internet using GPRS and use my laptop via tethering to submit answer to the problem set and programming assignments. Overall, I think I did the tests very well.

Here are somethings I liked/disliked about the course:

  • Teacher is the most important element in a class. If teacher is uninteresting, everything else is. No amount of technology can save the situation. Tim is a great teacher. He talks a bit fast but after a while I started loving his style of talking and teaching. Some other classes (don’t want to point fingers at any specific course) didn’t have as good a teacher as Tim.
  • Free style writing on White/Black board instead of powerpoint was one of the highlights of the course. I think it was crucial for the success of the course. Many other courses which I signed up at Coursera were using powerpoints and the teachers (some of the greatest names in CS) were reading out from the powerpoint slides. I couldn’t sustain interest in such courses, how much ever great those teachers are. The way Tim taught the class is a role model and brought back memories of some of the best classes I had taken in real classroom years ago when I was a fulltime student.
  • Timing and difficulty level of the exercises within the lecture is another extremely important element.
  • A good teacher is far far better than self-learning from a book. I learnt tons of new things in these 5 weeks than I would have ever learnt in 5 weeks of reading.
  • The importance of taking notes cannot be overstated. This was the single best decision I ever took. I carried the notebooks around along with my laptop and used it whenever I got free time (sometime, even at work, when I am waiting for compilation to finish or in the evenings). The notes were handy while doing problem sets and programming assignments for a quick revisit to some particular lecture or to look up specific algorithm etc.
  • I didn’t use any text book though Tim recommended a few. I have CLR with me, but surprisingly I didn’t use it much while doing the course.
  • If I have seen one single use of Technology in recent times that positively affects the human beings, then that is this new experiment of online teaching.

Overall, it was a great experience with this course and I would like to thank Tim and Coursera for offering this great course online. I am looking forward to the part 2 of this course.

I also signed up for some of the new courses offered at Udacity. One of them that I am really excited about is the Web design course by Steve Huffman. I really like the style of presentation at Udacity. It is direct. It is short. The listener is tested at the end of (almost) every video. That makes it extremely interesting. Just like playing a video game!

Syndicated 2012-05-01 07:00:00 from Ramakrishnan Muthukrishnan

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