I want to address the following quote from the article: "During the fall term, the Stanford students taking CS221 preferred watching the KnowLabs videos. Thrun says this improved their performance."
I took the official Stanford offering this past fall. I am not a Stanford student (anymore), but I enrolled as part of SCPD. As a result of the official course starting two weeks earlier than the public offering, the course staff usually didn't post up the YouTube videos in time for me to do the assignments, so I relied primarily on the lectures. (Actually, as a distance student, I relied upon the lecture recordings.)
I eventually did catch up on the YouTube videos, and I can attest that they are indeed better. However, they produced superior results mainly because they covered more material. For example, in one case, I did over two pages of error-prone calculations because I didn't know the mathematical shortcut that was taught in the YouTube videos. And I gasped as the professors spelled out in detail how to do problems that I had to think hard about how to do. Indeed, one problem that I was pleasantly challenged by on the midterm was simply not covered in lecture; in contrast, the professors explained it tutorial-style on YouTube.
Using the terminology of the course, I would say that the YouTube videos "overfitted" to the homework and exam problems -- so of course the students preferred the videos!
I do suspect that short, interactive, and extremely polished videos will be proven to be better in most cases, but unfortunately this experiment cannot be used as a basis for forming that conclusion. Clearly, the lectures were handicapped.
And to be honest, I am skeptical of how videos would perform against some of the tremendously excellent lectures out there, such as the introductory computer science lectures that are posted at Stanford Engineering Everywhere.
With all this said, I had a great deal of fun taking this course. I applaud the course staff for doing a stellar job, and I am grateful to be part of what I am certain will be a historical experiment.
I took the official Stanford offering this past fall. I am not a Stanford student (anymore), but I enrolled as part of SCPD. As a result of the official course starting two weeks earlier than the public offering, the course staff usually didn't post up the YouTube videos in time for me to do the assignments, so I relied primarily on the lectures. (Actually, as a distance student, I relied upon the lecture recordings.)
I eventually did catch up on the YouTube videos, and I can attest that they are indeed better. However, they produced superior results mainly because they covered more material. For example, in one case, I did over two pages of error-prone calculations because I didn't know the mathematical shortcut that was taught in the YouTube videos. And I gasped as the professors spelled out in detail how to do problems that I had to think hard about how to do. Indeed, one problem that I was pleasantly challenged by on the midterm was simply not covered in lecture; in contrast, the professors explained it tutorial-style on YouTube.
Using the terminology of the course, I would say that the YouTube videos "overfitted" to the homework and exam problems -- so of course the students preferred the videos!
I do suspect that short, interactive, and extremely polished videos will be proven to be better in most cases, but unfortunately this experiment cannot be used as a basis for forming that conclusion. Clearly, the lectures were handicapped.
And to be honest, I am skeptical of how videos would perform against some of the tremendously excellent lectures out there, such as the introductory computer science lectures that are posted at Stanford Engineering Everywhere.
With all this said, I had a great deal of fun taking this course. I applaud the course staff for doing a stellar job, and I am grateful to be part of what I am certain will be a historical experiment.