

Udacity Statistics 101 (a critique of Udacity's Stats class) - paradoja
http://www.angrymath.com/2012/09/udacity-statistics-101.html

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fusiongyro
This articulates a lot of the misgivings I have about these attempts at
reinventing education online. Fundamentally, the problem isn't a lack of
technology in education--Udacity took a bad stats class and gave it to the
world. Not a great way to prove their worth.

Good classes are hard to make and run. Technological facilitation can make a
good class better and it can bring a good class to the world, but the limiting
factor here is still quality.

As an aside, Thrun also demonstrated that in many cases those who "do," cannot
teach. And he should continue to "do," and find better teachers to do the
teaching.

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SudarshanP
I did not go through the stats course from udacity, but went through the build
your own robotic car class. I would like to say the opposite of what the
author of this article says. The conventional education system is designed to
suit people who lean deductively. They prefer to "stand on top of concepts
they know"... Then there are people who like to learn by dabbling. People who
learn by tinkering. Such people find too much formalism annoying.

Think of it like this... If your child is trying to stand up and walk, dont
try to get its gait perfected. Let it enjoy the success of barely standing and
moving a few steps forward. I would say "every child has the right to enjoy
this moment"... Not just the Usain bolt's and the ballet dancers. I think
irrespective of the subject, the initial learning event is just scaffolding. I
don't think the best ballet dancer remembers any part of how she actually
learnt to walk.

When I attended the robotics class, I left knowing that "Multiplying gaussians
is a cool thing" I figured the skeleton of how particle filters work. Will I
drive a car for which I wrote the code. Absolutely not. Will I ask my enemy to
sit in a car for which I wrote the code? Absolutely not. But I still got
something. Something beyond frustration of being less than "super genius". I
left saying "hey that is neat". Tomorrow when I invoke a Kalman filter in say
OpenCV, I will feel less insecure about the abilities of that "magic black
box". To me the robotic car became a "product of extreme passion created by
brilliant hackers" than "mysterious devices created by other worldly geniuses"

If I wanted definitions I would look up Mathworld or something better. If I am
going to write a paper on genetics, I am not going to use a stats 101 lecture
notes as my reference. But here exists a phase in my learning where I actually
do not care about the difference in dividing by N or N-1 or N+1. What the guys
obsessed with formalism do is that they make that phase such a huge pain, that
I bother not to cross it.

I get a way lot more "per hour invested" or "per dollar invested" from online
education. From my point of view. That is the major disruption. The barrier to
exploration has been almost eliminated. I could dabble with writing science
fiction and then take a peep at anatomy.

Somethings like "A guy walked in and it was left in the video" is a positive
sign. It shows that they are a scrappy startup creating a minimum viable
product. If people start using this product even without the polish, it
indicates real value. This is a standard startup practice. Better production
quality means fewer classes and slower growth and less data for analytics. So
I actually congratulate them for not obsessing with stuff like Video quality.
Do you have any idea how google looked when it was released?

Does it have its shortcomings? Yes it does. Am I glad such alternatives exist
to "Colorless, Odorless, Tasteless, Expensive Credentialling". Between
Stanford or MIT and an online course I would definitely go to the Physical
school. But between a tier 2 Indian Univ, I would prefer an online education
and use a university only for a credential.

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whichdan
Neither MIT OCW or Khan Academy offer a structured introduction to Statistics.
Are there any comparable online courses that are better?

Side note: The course is on MIT OCW, but it's simply notes and exams.

Edit: It looks like Coursera recently launched a course:
<https://www.coursera.org/course/stats1>

