

Free Stanford AI Class is a “Beta” for a Commercial Launch? - aheilbut
http://dltj.org/article/stanford-ai-class-is-beta-for-commercial-launch/

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Homunculiheaded
I could be wrong, but based on Know Labs own company description: "We're a
Silicon Valley-based startup looking to change the future of education by
making it more accessible and less expensive." I don't think the aim is to
charge students for courses like ai-class, but rather quite the opposite.

It would look to me like the idea is to create a platform to allow
universities to create their own version of ai-class. MIT gains a lot of
positive press from OCW but it must cost them at least a little staff time and
money to maintain and run it. I would guess there is definitely a market for a
company to claim "Hey we're the guys behind Standford's famous AI class
experiment, and for a price that saves you a lot of work and staff time you
can have that same, well known, platform today"

Having worked in Universities for years, I know that at the institutional
level 'buy-it' almost always trumps 'built-it'.

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khafra
The AI Class official twitter account asked people whether they'd be willing
to pay $2000 for a Stanford-level CS Master's degree taught in a similar
format.

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stfu
Do you have by any chance a link to that particular tweet? I have looked
through the tweets since September and just couldn't find it. Would love to
read what the feedback was on that suggestion.

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dpapathanasiou
It was from Sebastian Thrun's twitter account:
[http://twitter.com/#!/SebastianThrun/status/1123978353701150...](http://twitter.com/#!/SebastianThrun/status/112397835370115072)

~~~
Homunculiheaded
And more interestingly he follows up a few weeks later claiming that standford
could actually offer the masters for free!
[http://twitter.com/#!/SebastianThrun/status/1171319537146429...](http://twitter.com/#!/SebastianThrun/status/117131953714642944)

Free master's in CS from standford is a pretty mind blowing idea. Would be
really curious to see what would happen to higher ed if you completely
removed/minimized the cost factor.

~~~
dpapathanasiou
Thrun had some interesting things to say about his vision for the future of
higher education:

 _Thrun’s ultimate mission is a virtual university in which the best
professors broadcast their lectures to tens of thousands of students. Testing,
peer interaction and grading would happen online; a cadre of teaching
assistants would provide some human supervision; and the price would be within
reach of almost anyone. “Literally, we can probably get the same quality of
education I teach in class for about 1 to 2 percent of the cost,” Thrun told
me._

 _The traditional university, in his view, serves a fortunate few,
inefficiently, with a business model built on exclusivity. “I’m not at all
against the on-campus experience,” he said. “I love it. It’s great. It has a
lot of things which cannot be replaced by anything online. But it’s also
insanely uneconomical.”_

 _Thrun acknowledges that there are still serious quality-control problems to
be licked. How do you keep an invisible student from cheating? How do you even
know who is sitting at that remote keyboard? Will the education really be as
compelling — and will it last? Thrun believes there are technological answers
to all of these questions, some of them being worked out already by other
online frontiersmen._

 _“If we can solve this,” he said, “I think it will disrupt all of higher
education.”_

[http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/03/opinion/the-university-
of-...](http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/03/opinion/the-university-of-
wherever.html?_r=2&pagewanted=all)

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mattlong
I'm partaking in both the AI and ML classes and I find the ML experience much
more user-friendly and polished than the AI class. For example, being able to
speed up the lecture videos is brilliant. I find the AI class video questions
a bit frustrating to use. IMHO, Know Labs has a ways to go.

~~~
markbao
Agreed. The ML one is much more organized and the design and experience are
both incredibly better. It has more of a _classroom_ and _course_ feeling to
it, rather than the AI class's _here's some video lectures and quizzes, now do
the tests._

The ML class also has a full-fledged Q&A forum (which has LaTeX markup
support), which, to me, is a necessary component. The about page[0] lists
Stanford students as developers (the first one is an undergraduate sophomore
named Frank Chen), and the team is different than the guys behind Know Labs
(from a quick search.)

Andrew Ng is an excellent teacher. Seriously, the ML class is the most fun
I've had learning in a college course environment. That speaks volumes.

[0]: <http://www.ml-class.org/course/aboutus/index>

~~~
webspiderus
for what it's worth, I'm taking Stanford's version of the ML class that Prof.
Ng is offering, and aside from being a couple of weeks and ahead and having to
do a final project, it is pretty much the same offering as that available the
outside world. I think this could explain the level of quality of the website,
or at the very least it having more of a course feeling to it.

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ninjin
Interestingly it appears that the ML-class (<http://www.ml-class.org>) and DB-
class (<http://www.db-class.org/>) are not associated with Know Labs. But I
might be wrong. I initially thought all three of them was a part of a Stanford
effort to push their own name even further (perhaps in response to the online
MIT lecture videos that have been quite popular in recent years).

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Duckpaddle2
My daughter is now looking at colleges. These courses both from MIT and
Stanford give me, the one who will be paying, a sense of what my 70K per year
will be buying. I think this is great marketing for less cost than those mass
mailings all the schools seem to be cramming into our mailbox. I just wish all
these tier 1 schools would offer something online, it would make judging the
quality of what I will soon be buying a lot easier.

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antoinehersen
I do not want exactly to complain since the class is currently free and I am
enjoying it quite a bit, but there is a lot of issues. The integration between
the Youtube video and the quizz is poor, no official forum for the student, no
lecture notes. Everything as a very beta feels to it.

On the contrary the platform for the ML class is of very high quality and the
content more polished. I especially like the possibility to speed up the video
lecture, having programming assignment, and how easy it is to submit them.

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josscrowcroft
Some of the best things in life are commercial and still have a phenomenal
impact on humanity...

I understand why people might be wary, like if the Khan academy suddenly
opened up premium memberships, but this course was never designated as a non-
commercial concept (though it was very much billed as a 'beta')

A bit of amateur Google-sleuthing doesn't really amount to a groundbreaking
piece of news, in my opinion.

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turing
This isn't really news. Ai-class.com links directly to Know Labs website.

~~~
dvcat
This makes a lot of sense. I was working through a couple of the assignments
last night when I realized that a lot of the questions seemed to test reading
comprehension rather than proper understanding of the material. I had a while
back used Prof. Ng's video lectures and notes (available on his site) as a
supplement to my own machine learning class and those are designed to both
stretch your mind and test your understanding. I was kind of hoping that that
level of quality was being shared with the rest of the world but that doesn't
seem to be the case :(

~~~
aheilbut
That's exactly the discussion I had that led me to go and want to check out
the site. Apparently the pace and nature of the (AI class) homeworks are quite
different in the actual Stanford course.

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robryan
Guess it has a lot to do with having to be corrected automatically rather than
a professor going through your process on questions with individual
correction.

That might actually be an interesting AI research area, making computers
better at marking based on process the student used rather than just the final
answer. Wonder if much has been done in that area as it will become more
important as more learning goes online and people want more than multiple
choice/ final numerical answer type stuff.

~~~
dhotson
They can probably infer it based on the distribution of answers.

They can probably infer the mistakes people made by looking at the really
common but incorrect answers. I'm guessing that lots of people get the same
wrong answers as each other.

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misterbee
Yes, at is says on the <http://www.knowlabs.com/> website.

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teja1990
I don't know if Knowlabs is testing it to commercially launch it. But i saw a
tweet from Sebastian Thrun's twitter account a month or so back asking 'if
you're provided with Stanford quality education with a tuition fees of $2000 ,
will you take up the course' i dont know what replies he got.. It intrigues
me.

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americandesi333
I wonder if this experiment will just remain an experiment because politically
Stanford is not ready for open free education. I remember reading an article
recently in NY Times that highlighted how Stanford had two opposite camps of
opinions. They are bidding to open an engineering campus in NY, which expands
their formal education at the same time as starting these free courses, which
is all about informal distributed learning. From Stanford's president, it
didn't sound like something he was keen on expanding... a classic disruption
in the education industry. Reminds me of newspapers.

[http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/03/opinion/the-university-
of-...](http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/03/opinion/the-university-of-
wherever.html?_r=1&scp=17&sq=stanford&st=cse)

