
Coursera/Stanford online algorithms I course – a retrospective - wglb
http://eli.thegreenplace.net/2012/05/08/courserastanford-online-algorithms-i-course-a-retrospective/
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Homunculiheaded
It's funny how often people complain "too easy" but I've never heard someone
complain "didn't learn enough", in regards to the coursera courses.

I think it's an indicator of how deeply broken our education system is that
when assessing the value of a class people worry about how smart it made them
feel (this is after all what it really means to pass a 'difficult' class),
rather than how much they learned and could do with the materials after the
class.

Sebastian Thrun even made a comment somewhere that he realized for years he'd
be making his standford classes hard, not for the sake of learning but for
living up to the reputation of being hard.

A class that feels 'easy' but which has a high amount of 'new stuff learned'
should be the pinnacle of what a class can achieve. Difficulty should be a
negative property of learning, sometimes necessary, but never desirable in and
of itself.

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waterlesscloud
Difficulty can be a good indicator that you're at the edges of your current
understanding.

The MIT electronics class often poses questions during the lectures or in the
homework that are based on what you've already covered but involve concepts
which are still upcoming.

This is difficult, but it's vastly superior as a learning technique as you
have to work your way through it for yourself.

~~~
Cyranix
Assignments that require you to extend beyond the covered material can indeed
be extremely effective, though I'd qualify that with "for the right person."

The COMP 201 course at Rice University (intro comp sci for non-majors) was the
experience that started me on a career path in software/web development.
Several of my classmates dropped the course because the instructor used such
challenging problems on chapter exams. Even though I hit/exceeded the exam
time limit almost every time, I found the exams to be incredibly rewarding. I
vividly recall grinding my teeth over an exam prompt asking us to write a set
of controls for an RC car that could be driven with a TV remote control and
also needed to elegantly remember macros of control sequences... only to show
up the next day in the professor's office and be handed a remote control,
driving the actual RC car with the solution from my exam. It's hard to beat
engagement like that.

However, I still appreciate Coursera for what it is. I'm taking the machine
learning course right now, and I feel that I'm gaining a fair amount of
knowledge relative to the amount of time I can put in. If I were to dedicate
more time to my post-academic education, I'm sure I'd want something that
moved at a faster pace or set more difficult challenges before me. It just
doesn't seem useful to judge Coursera negatively because it doesn't meet an
expectation it wasn't designed to meet.

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singular
Perhaps I've been out of formal education for too long (esp. on the
mathematical side of things), but I did find the material quite challenging,
more so the problem sets than the programming challenges. Part of that was
emotional, I didn't do a computer science degree and thus find this kind of
stuff almost... intimidating. It's the sort of stuff that gets asked at
'serious' interviews and thus I've had a sense of it being somehow too clever,
beyond me.

It's not helped by posts like this, the arrogant 'oh it was all too easy' tone
is frustrating. Not everything in life is a competition, and as others have
said, it ought to be about actually learning something, not proving how
wonderfully clever you are.

What's particularly frustrating in all of this is that I found this particular
course _wonderfully_ lectured, and the material fascinating. Reading stuff
like this takes away that sense of fascination at the material and replaces it
with a sense of being a not quite good enough participant in a competition I
didn't want to be a part of.

/rant

~~~
icegreentea
I'm gonna back you up here, though from a slightly different perspective.
People like you are exactly why this course seems easy for some other people.
As what is essentially an introductory course for this subject, it should not
be aiming to really challenge the top quartile of the class (or whatever). It
should aim to provide the best possible foundation for the next course for as
many people as reasonable.

The fact that the course has managed to reach out to all sorts of people
(including someone like you) is something that should be celebrated. That it
was designed so that someone who isn't 'good at math' (whatever that means)
struggled a bit, but still got through it all is amazing. That's something
that really makes a great introductory course.

After all, it's stupid easy to make a course hard, or to assign shit loads of
work. The real trick is making it just hard enough.

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singular
Not to make this too much about ego :-) but I am actually quite good at maths,
did v. well at school, did engineering degree, etc. so I'm not sure I'm a
great example, rather I am out of practice and not as comfortable with this
stuff now as I once was :-)

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Estragon

      > I still wish that the course would try to cater for the stronger
      > students as well, so that completing it with a high grade would give
      > a real sense of accomplishment.
    

Maybe the problem is that you were taking the course as a way to cultivate a
sense of accomplishment? Isn't the most important measure the effectiveness
with which it helped you develop the concepts and skills the course was
targeting?

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DennisP
If you're looking for a hard class, Probabilistic Graphical Models might suit
better. The staff says that other than a small portion of the homeworks which
they couldn't auto-grade, it's the same material as the real course at
Stanford, where it's one of the hardest classes in the graduate CS department.

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gms
a million upvotes this class is killing me

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otoburb
The beauty of online courses is that people will hopefully have the
opportunity to cheaply repeat lectures ad-nauseum until they finally feel they
really KNOW their stuff.

This is contrasted to the brutal method of being forced to learn things within
a short period of time, often forgetting what you learned or just picking up
banal mechanics. The focus shifts back to thoroughly learning course
materials.

Online education is a true equalizer.

NB: Been a fan of online education since OCW started up where the costs of the
raw material plummeted to the cost of your internet connection.

~~~
DennisP
That's exactly my plan for PGM. If I'd had nothing else keeping me busy maybe
I would've kept up, but as soon as I fell behind it was clear I was in
trouble.

Coursera's talked about maybe taking videos down for a while between courses,
I hope they don't. I'm going to save them just in case, but it'd be nice to
have the inline quizzes.

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dhawalhs
I think the course was at the right difficulty considering that it was an on-
line course targeted towards an audience with different backgrounds and skill
levels. In fact, in the forums there were a few people complaining about it
being too difficult. Plus a course that is not targeted towards full time
students can't really have the same effort levels as one that it is. If the
course turns out to be too easy for you, maybe it wasn't designed for you.

~~~
ashliana
I suppose one option would be to also have optional homework for those seeking
additional challenge?

~~~
dhawalhs
There were some optional theory questions (ungraded) which were more
challenging and could be discussed in the forums.

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danielroseman
I'm glad you found it easy. Personally, I found it _very_ challenging:
although I thought I matched the requirements for mathematical background that
Prof Roughgarden outlined in the intro lecture, it turned out to be a struggle
to keep up with some of the concepts when it came to apply them in the theory
questions.

The programming exercises were fun, but I don't think they were really the
point of the course - this "part 1", at least, was much more about analysis
than about design.

As a contrast, I've just started their compilers course: there the theory
questions are slightly easier, whereas the programming questions are _much_
more involved - the first one has already taken me several hours and I'm
nowhere near finished.

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RedwoodCity
You took a class called "Design and Analysis of Algorithms I" and complained
that the problem sets were too easy. What were you expecting?

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eleith
thanks for the retrospective, eli.

we have a wide array of students to cater to and better setting expectations
and providing challenges at the right level to the right students is something
that we hope to iterate on and improve over time.

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takosuke
I didn't catch algorithms but am dipping my feet into automata, logic,
compilers and machine learning right now. I'm going to have to drop compilers
and machine learning because it's too much work for my schedule right now but
I will still follow the lectures. It's a mixed bag, I must say. The user
experience of the website itself works a charm. The classes themselves, not so
much. After being addicted to khan academy for a while and trying udacity, the
dryness of the coursera classes feels like a big setback. I am watching the
same slide for 2 minutes while a teacher throws a lot of technical lingo at me
and the only way it feels like an improvement over a brick and mortar school
is that I can rewind until I've figured out what he is trying to say. This is
in opposition to other courses out there which do involve you strongly in ways
that are more suited to the medium. I have no complaints about the difficulty
level - I do, however, with the deadline system, since a lot of people taking
these classes (including me) don't have the flexibility to spend the necessary
amount of time every week, and once you are one week behind unless the class
is under your level it's hard to catch up.

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ramkalari
It was a very well designed course and Tim is a fantastic teacher. I scored a
100 but I wouldn't say the course was easy. For the most part, it was obvious.
I found some of the questions slightly tricky and I would have got it wrong if
I hadn't taken the time to read/think. Overall, I'm extremely happy with the
time spent learning from Tim.

That said, if you are looking for really hard challenges, you should take
Daphne Koller's Probabilistic Graphical Models.

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Jacobi
"The exam included questions from the lectures" When I was a student I hated
this practice from some professors.

~~~
adestefan
I used to do this to put in at least one or two softball questions. It helped
to weed out who was paying attention and helped when deciding if someone
should get a C or C+.

~~~
lawnchair_larry
You shouldn't be grading then. They are not taking a class in Paying
Attention, they are taking a class in algorithms. If they know the material,
that is what matters. I also cannot stand this practice.

~~~
aplusbi
And people who know the material should be able to answer those questions
without any difficulty. What's the problem?

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sesqu
I'm assuming the problem is questions like this:

    
    
      Recall the Master Method and its three parameters a,b,d. Which of the following is the best interpretation of b^d, in the context of divide-and-conquer algorithms?
    

Alternatively, the problem might be questions that ask for the state of an
algorithm at some point, when the algorithm can be correctly implemented in
different ways and one is expected to recall/go back and check the exact
implementation used.

~~~
aplusbi
Those kind of questions should be taken out back and put out of their misery,
but I don't think there's anything to suggest that adestefan was asking those
kinds of questions.

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goodgoblin
If you were looking for harder problems, I would suggest buying one of the
books recommended on the home page. Kleinberg & Tardos Algorithm Design for
example was used in an algorithms class I took, and the questions after each
chapter were used for both homework and exams. I found them very challenging.

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dlo
I imagine that they are straitjacketed by the current technology that is
available to auto-grade the assignments. But I bet this situation will improve
with time.

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RedwoodCity
You took a class called "Design and Analysis of Algorithms I" and complained
that the problem sets were to easy. What were you expecting?

