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Jason Eisner
[A2A] That's interesting. You are probably talking about the course offered at least twice by Dan Jurafsky and Chris Manning at Stanford. I discussed it with them a few times (since they used some of my material, and since I was quite curious to hear about their overall experience).
As I recall, they found it to take a great deal of time. It's a huge commitment to be responsible for so many students. If you waste 5 minutes of 100,000 people's time, that adds up to a wasted year of human life right there, so you have a moral obligation to get your lecture or homework just right even if that requires days and days. They felt they always wanted to make changes, e.g., the second time they offered the course; but it is generally hard to edit the lecture videos from what I understand.
Someone else may step up. I imagine I'll teach an NLP MOOC eventually, perhaps after writing a textbook. Sebastian Thrun actually asked me to teach such a course back in fall 2011, right after he started Udacity and taught the original MOOC (on AI, with Peter Norvig). However, I didn't know where to get 20 TAs, and I was worried I'd have to oversimplify my current course to make it work as a MOOC.
In the meantime, my NLP course materials are freely available, for what that's worth. I could post videos from that course as well. But I agree that a MOOC has advantages: you're on a schedule, and you can discuss topics with TAs and with a cohort of classmates who are on the same schedule.
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[A2A] That's interesting. You are probably talking about the course offered at least twice by Dan Jurafsky and Chris Manning at Stanford. I discussed it with them a few times (since they used some of my material, and since I was quite curious to hear about their overall experience).
As I recall, they found it to take a great deal of time. It's a huge commitment to be responsible for so many students. If you waste 5 minutes of 100,000 people's time, that adds up to a wasted year of human life right there, so you have a moral obligation to get your lecture or homework just right even if that requires days and days. They felt they always wanted to make changes, e.g., the second time they offered the course; but it is generally hard to edit the lecture videos from what I understand.
Someone else may step up. I imagine I'll teach an NLP MOOC eventually, perhaps after writing a textbook. Sebastian Thrun actually asked me to teach such a course back in fall 2011, right after he started Udacity and taught the original MOOC (on AI, with Peter Norvig). However, I didn't know where to get 20 TAs, and I was worried I'd have to oversimplify my current course to make it work as a MOOC.
In the meantime, my NLP course materials are freely available, for what that's worth. I could post videos from that course as well. But I agree that a MOOC has advantages: you're on a schedule, and you can discuss topics with TAs and with a cohort of classmates who are on the same schedule.
See Questions On Quora
Continue reading...
