I am enrolled on the on-line Stanford AI Class... http://ai-class.com - along with 150,000 others - to watch how they present and deliver the "Introduction to AI" course, to see how the on-line assessment and quizzes work, and to see how student interaction with tutors and each other is arranged. Its been an interesting experience so far. Everyone seems to be enjoying the course and the community. The short video segments for each lecture are broken up with quizzes to check understanding as you go along. Often with check boxes and type in areas overlaid with the video material itself.
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Hi Austin. I'm enrolled in the AI class too, although I've switched to a basic enrollment so I don't have to keep up with the homework. I'm finding it hard to find enough hours in the week on top of work and IDEL. In fact I'm a bit behind I think, having only done the first two units, but so far I'm fiding the experience worthwhile. The videos are really clearly presented and the way the course id designed to take you through the material step by step works well with this kind of subjetc matter. I think this brings out that padagogy has to be suited to the area of study. IDEL is very discursive and the sorts of tasks and resources we have reflect that.
With the AI class, contrastingly, I appreciate the more linear progression as the material in each lesson often builds directly on previous videos. What do you think?
I was realistic and registered for Basic Mode access from the start
I wanted to see how the courses were structured and delivered... and how the quizzes, online assessment and class contacts worked for such a large class.
I agree... for this course there is a lot of material and there are well established text books and flows to get people through it. I like the frequent short quizzes to check understanding. I found I had a lot of out by one counting errors on paths through search trees... as I was probably not paying sufficient attention to the question... so I left out start nodes in the count and so on. But it made you think.
This goes beyond distance education. I think quizzes like this could work in on-campus lessons as well... everyone will have some sort of mobile device (or could be lent one for the session) that could link the to a class wide quiz and feedback session.. much like clickers are used in some lectures today.