Show HN: my feedback for Stanford AI course

~~~ The Good: 1) Video editing: This was a subtle but wonderful feature of the lectures. Specifically, editing out the lengthy seconds it takes the instructor to write out comments or equations made the viewing much more focused and engaging. I think this is an important feature because it really takes advantage of the medium and moves beyond one of the limitations of live, classroom teaching--pacing. 2) Short video clips: The short clips made it easy to consume the course in small nuggets completely up to the schedule of individual viewer. It also made it easy to review specific points later on. 3) Interactive quizzes: Having to stop and figure out the solution to a problem no matter how long it took was an extremely rewarding learning method. Contrast this with in-person classroom lectures in which if an instructor asks a question of the class, someone will answer and the lecture moves on even if everyone didn't understand it. If anything, I encourage there to be more quizzes of this type in future iterations of the course. 4) Office Hours: I thought the crowd-sourced office hours were a great addition to the regular curriculum. I wish the format had been in place from the beginning, but once it was implemented it was fun to vote on questions and see them addressed by the professors. ~ Areas for Future Development: 1) Include recommended readings: Either text book chapters or technical articles. A few students posted some interesting articles on reddit, including a great article by Thrun on Particle Filters, and Prof Norvig's piece "On Chomsky and the Two Cultures of Statistical Learning." Great stuff, would have loved to see more, especially articles considered to be "central" to the field. 2) Include programming assignments: To avoid the overhead of having to crunch student submitted assignments, have "Project Euler" style questions that have only one right answer, but have to be computed programmatically. The NLP assignment was a good example of this, but the questions were too small in scope and could be figured out by hand. 3) Restrict the forums to a single source: I felt as though there were three active forums in the class, (not counting some great discussions on Hacker News). By the end of the term it seemed like the three forums differentiated themselves by topic-- reddit for general discussion, ai-qus for hw/quiz questions, and the onsite forum for office hours questions. Nevertheless, I felt like I was constantly missing out on interesting threads/questions and wished there was a single forum to rule them all. 4) Send recruitment letters after the final: I congratulate all those who received emails from the Professors on being among the top 1000 and being invited for work opportunities. My only wish-- other than getting such a letter myself of course-- is that the letters be sent after the final is over. I'm guessing the Professors didn't expect the letters to become public right away, but for those who weren't at the very top it was a little disheartening to learn about that right before the final. ~~~