[iqster]

Bump. In the past, I've been through Stanford's IOS dev course and ML course (via iTunes). Currently, I'm doing the AI course. It is truly amazing that Stanford is giving away this content for free.

As an academic, it makes me wondering how education will change over the next 10 years. If a prof gives a fantastic lecture in the Fall of 2010, does he need to repeat himself in 2011? I had the experience of lecturing an undergrad course in Programming Languages many years ago. Honestly, the content didn't change much (I was teaching Scheme, ML and Prolog). I did get a bit better answering and anticipating student questions. I'll admit that in some cases, content must be updated fairly frequently. For instance, Prof. Ousterhaut's web app course on the site seems to be covering Rails 2.x.x. Teaching it today, perhaps 3.x or 3.1 would be used.

However, when I look at how well the community can improve the quality of a lecture, it blows my mind. In the Stanford AI class, for instance, the lecturer made a slight error where he defined the admissibility criteria of the h function (estimated cost) in A* search as less than the true cost rather than less than or equal to the true cost. Well ... this was quickly spotted by students and a correction was promptly issued. This blows my mind!

This also has the potential of making things worse on the supply side of education. In the last decade, it has undoubtedly gotten harder to get a faculty position in Computer Science. Will the advent of online education make that situation worse? As someone who has been an educator in the past, my personal opinion is that education should be available for free. But, I worry that it might not be sustainable.

[dpatru]

> I worry that it might not be sustainable.

The rise of Wikipedia with the concomitant decline of commercial, paper encyclopedias offers some insight into the future of education. In the future, there will be more education available and it will be very cheap.

What will not be sustainable anymore is a career in education where one gives essentially the same lecture for 30 years but gets paid as if he has created an entirely new lecture every year.

[pbhjpbhj]

>What will not be sustainable anymore is a career in education where one gives essentially the same lecture for 30 years but gets paid as if he has created an entirely new lecture every year. //

It will be interesting to see how this affects the development of subjects like mathematics. Without the income from teaching students how will the capitalist system maintain academics in research? Who will pay if education effectively becomes free?

Don't get me wrong. It's fantastic that a brilliant lecturer can now lecture to as many people who choose to watch the video - that's not quite educating them but almost. I see that an institution then can train millions of people using a single good lecturer and a system of auxiliaries, admin staff and what-have-you. But then what of those who were doing [not directly/immediately commercial] research supported by their lecture positions.

[wtallis]

Math is probably the subject least at risk. Every prospective engineer or scientist needs to learn a lot of math, and a significant fraction of those students will be unable to master the subject by simply watching videos. That means that there will always be a significant demand for real, live math teachers.

[chad_oliver]

I'm not sure about that. Certainly the need to learn math will remain reasonably constant, but I think you underestimate the ability of technology. Once we get high quality explanations that remove most bugs before they form, and practice questions that expose problems quickly (it wouldn't be too difficult to design a program to choose which problems each student should be given), and some sort of weak siri-level AI that can watch the student working to discover what they understand ... when all that happens, the demand for maths teachers/tutors will be very low. I suspect that a single qualified teacher could service 400 students.

EDIT to add: the problem with human tutors is that they are inconvenient. It takes time to schedule a tutor, and you can only get help at certain times (that is, during the tutoring session). Human tutors have many advantages, but a program that is merely passable will nevertheless be immensely popular simply because it is convenient.

[pbhjpbhj]

>Every prospective engineer or scientist needs to learn a lot of math, and a significant fraction of those students will be unable to master the subject by simply watching videos. //

One ordinarily learns the maths appropriate to ones course in that department which runs the course.

[thomaslangston]

Agreed. 1-on-1 teaching seems to be very useful to many students especially for math. $20/hr. math tutors fill the tables at my local public library.

[pbhjpbhj]

>$20/hr. math tutors fill the tables at my local public library. //

Do you mean your libraries have classrooms for private tuition? I'm not familiar with this sort of thing. In my country private tuition happens at the tutor or students house.

[thomaslangston]

Nope, we have tables that fill the open spaces. These are first come, first served are available for tutors, project works or studying, or just general reading space.

[CesareBorgia]

>What will not be sustainable anymore is a career in education where one gives essentially the same lecture for 30 years but gets paid as if he has created an entirely new lecture every year.

If a musician gets a royalty every time his song is played on the radio, why can't a professor get a royalty every time his video is watched?

[huherto]

  "Will the advent of online education make that situation worse?"

My guess is that we will still need teachers, but their role will change. They will spend more time tutoring students or helping them make progress on individual projects.

[ddw]

I'm taking the ML class and Dr. Ng occasionally mentions in the videos how he talks to Silicon Valley start-ups to helped them implement algorithms. What if the future professor not only make his money from teaching at a university but by consulting with businesses? She would just be using her expertise to teach in a different area. There's often a disconnect between academia and business that doesn't make a lot of sense.

+1 to what everyone else is saying in this thread about the Stanford classes, I'm loving the ML one so far.

[Qworg]

This is what Carnegie Mellon is already doing - contrary to other university's I've seen/attended, CMU has three classes of professors, instead of two.

1) Tenured Professors - traditional tenure track. 2) Untenured Instructors - traditional instructors. 3) Research Professors - essentially freelance entrepreneurs in the research space under the CMU umbrella. They seek their own funding, hire students, advise, but don't teach.

[abless]

Andrew Ng (along with Sebastian Thrun) are both working for Google (on driverless cars).

[X-Istence]

The driverless car project is bloody brilliant. I absolutely love the videos that have come out from people that got to sit in the passenger seat while it drove itself!

[pyoung]

I think the Stanford AI and ML classes demonstrate what can be done with lower division and introductory classes of technical nature (physics, chemistry, CS, etc.). However, this model doesn't work as well with liberal arts classes (where assignments tend to be in the form of papers and essays, not easy to grade/standardize) and upper division tech classes (where the material is too complex for a 'stock' lecture).

As such, I doubt this will lead to any major shifts in the employment situation of academics.