Online Stanford Classes Explore new Models for CS Learning

I've completed all three online classes (AI, DB, machine learning). There were not only videos with questions embedded, but also homeworks (for all three), and a midterm exam, and a final exam (for AI and DB). The homeworks were deep and thorough, and included programming exercises. For the DB class, students had to write SQL code, DTD, XSD, XPath, XQuery and XSLT. For the ML class, there were Matlab/Octave programming problem sets for every single topic. Students' answers and programs had been uploaded to a server for automatic evaluation. Moreover, after doing the homework once, it was possible to generate a new list of exercises, and try to achieve a better result. Doing these classes required a ton of work, so it's not surprising lots of people gave up. There was no already-paid tuition fee to lose.

When learning becomes a game, where you earn achievements and unlock items, then you will see a change in education. Education needs to be fun, not a daunting task of exams, homework and lameness. When you can create something that students will freely spend more time doing than anything else, that should be the goal. It's a shame that education has become a job.

Response to Anonymous above: There was no lameness in the ml class, nor were there exams. There were excellent lectures with useful quizzes where missing even a quarter of a point meant you were missing some subtle point in your understanding. And you could re-take the quiz until you got everything right. There were motivating programming exercises using real data to solve real problems with machine learning, where you could re-submit your code until it was accepted as correct. This was great fun! When I want to "earn achievements and unlock items", I play guitar hero :) But I didn't have much time for that last fall, as I was too busy having a blast with Dr. Ng's ML class.

I completed the advanced track of the machine learning course. What an amazing course. Every detail was carefully worked out, so as to provide great insight and understanding communicated with elegant simplicity. Now I'm enjoying reading research papers in the field that would have been opaque to me prior to the class. And I'm applying machine learning techniques to interesting problems. The class made learning this material fun and very enjoyable. Next semester I've signed up for 3 more of Stanford's free online classes. Highly recommended!
-Rafael Espericueta

Response to Anonymous Jan 11: I agree with online learning. The point is that education should be fun, not a job. A job pays you to not be fun. The point is that online learning SHOULD be used more. Read my comment under Planting Seeds in the Field of Knowledge. That will explain in more detail what I meant. I am not advocating for anything, I am simply looking at current young adults who are in school and not in school and observing their behavior. There are lots of facts and figures you and I could comment about, but I think we can both agree there is a severe problem with the education system. Something radically new, exciting, trendy, fun and effective needs to take place.