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Online courses are cute. The stanford machine learning course is a watered down travesty that doesn't compare to Andrew's original material out there. There is
by eshvk 13y ago
Online courses are cute. The stanford machine learning course is a watered down travesty that doesn't compare to Andrew's original material out there. There is a reason for that too. The harder the courses get, the more it is nice to have an actual person to talk to about this shit. My real analysis class made sense only because I was able to talk to the professor after class and understand why I should care about open balls or closed balls.
Similarly from a systems perspective, my OS class was the hardest C.S. class that I took. There was very little that I remember from the lectures but the most I took away was during designing shit and getting stuck and then going back and talking to the professor and brainstorming. This is stuff that inherently doesn't scale well to millions of people.
- yetanotherphd 13y agoThat course isn't representative. I don't know the thinking behind it, (it was one of their earlier MOOC courses) but there are many courses with much better and harder content. Of course it is better to have a real person, but not everyone has that luxury, or their real professors are no good.
- eshvk 13y agoSure. Learning from data (caltech) is a good course. But all I got from the course was to go pick up the book and learn this stuff by working through the problem set. And I have a pretty decent linear algebra and probability background. Imagine if you are getting into this stuff new (which is not an unreasonable assumption considering the diverse background of ML folks), this would be brutal. Math is a contact, no holds barred sport where some hand holding initially is pretty damn nice. Also, I did some schooling in the third world and I am never going to come out and say that someone putting material for a course online is a bad thing. I am just annoyed by this idea that a bunch of online videos is a superior or equally effective replacement to an education at MIT or Stanford.
- ilyanep 13y agoThe online problem sets for the Caltech course aren't what you get in real life when the course is being actively offered, and also it was a pretty basic/easy course. That's not to say there aren't other hard classes online or that Yaser isn't great at teaching, but yeah...