There are already a few university ML courses out there using Theano (for which Tensorflow is essentially a drop-in replacement), and I think this will be a muc

There are already a few university ML courses out there using Theano (for which Tensorflow is essentially a drop-in replacement), and I think this will be a much bigger trend over the next few years. IMHO for a first course it's useful to do some work at the Matlab/numpy level just so you get experience with deriving/implementing gradients yourself, but for larger (deep) models automatic differentiation is an amazing productivity boost that should make it possible to cover a lot of interesting topics that you'd otherwise not have space for.