Since today is Thanksgiving in Canada, I got a much needed day off to do some work! The Stanford online database and artificial intelligence courses are now open and I got a chance today to start working on those courses! Stanford also provides Machine Learning but I don't have the time to do all 3 courses at once so I chose DB and AI. After some minor hiccups with AI, the servers are finally running and I got to watch some of the videos on the materials.
I've got to say, after spending a few hours watching DB and AI videos, these courses are quite well done. The videos aren't too long and they provide good examples and explanations to explain the materials. There seems to be some notes created by the general public too. Overall, I'm quite impressed. I'll see later how I do when the materials get a little harder.
As of right now, I'm also taking another distance ed course, EOSC 116 at UBC. Compared to the 2 Stanford courses, I am quite unimpressed with EOSC 116. Compared to the lecture version and distance ed version of EOSC 116, this online course provides no lecture notes other than a bunch of textbook like pages of material to read. There are a few videos but they are not made specifically for the course like the AI and DB Stanford classes.
My complaint is that this online course does not prepare students for the course at all. For example, I copied and pasted a module's material (to be done in 2 weeks of time) and it ended up being over 100 pages in Microsoft Word. Granted, these did include a lot of pictures so the reading material wasn't quite 100 pages. However, by giving students a bunch of chapters to read in textbook form, we would have to make our own notes in order to study. I think UBC expects students to spend 10 hours outside of a class per course and trust me, with that 100 pages, there's no way I can make notes, study the course, explore the material, ask questions, do practice quiz in 20 hours (aka 2 weeks of time). On top of that, some of the questions that are asked are so low level and pure memorization that are not even useful. An example would be, "Where did this
Another complaint I have is that in this online course verus a lecture course, without a professor, it's hard to know what to focus on. Usually in class, a professor might consistently reiterate a specific concept so students would know to pay attention to this or the professor specifically mentions to make note of this. The modules do have objectives but these objectives are very general and broad and so I don't find them useful either.
Somehow, the distance ed course at UBC is 40 dollars more expensive than the lecture class. If it wasn't for that I'm out on co-op right now and I'm not on campus, I won't even take a distance ed course. It is now too late for me to drop this course and so I'm stuck here. I'm definitely discouraged from taking another distance ed course at UBC. However, these Stanford online courses are quite well organized and I hope to have more opportunities to take courses with them in the future! I hear that they were also talking about a Masters online degree earlier.
I'm taking 116 distance summer '14. Agree, too much to learn, huge volumes of text to choke down with no obvious way to compress the hundreds of factoids potentially examinable in the final. The open-book character of the 'mid-terms' ~ Quizzes means my high marks are irrelevant for those, I'm good at rapidly searching the material.
ReplyDeleteThe final is a must > 50%, but how does one know of the dozens of broad concepts and 1000+ simple-fact items is going to appear on the closed-notes final? I don't understand this course's logic at all.