However this brings me to preview my post-game analysis. While I have learned a lot of "interesting" things and have some appreciation for the effort the professors put into this, I have a few issues with this class and the medium in general:
- Technical stuff -- I guess mostly unavoidable, but hey, these guys work for Google man...
- Crashes and hangups making the videos inaccessible and delaying the homework. Better now but still not perfect;
- YouTube playback: If you pause the video the headings and controls cover part of the screen so if you want to do a screen grab you have to slip it in while the video is running and the instructor's GDM pen is not waving over the stuff you want to grab. Also if you miss pausing right at the end of the video you have to go back and reload everything. And really annoying, to re-view the Quiz Explanations you have to re-take the Quiz or else learn to maneuver through raw playlists somehow.
- Online Pedagogy -- The medium is/was not quite ready for Prime Rib...
- Sometimes the lesson videos are not clear, and sometimes they are just wrong. If I was in a classroom I could wave my hands around and ask, "What did you really mean there? Did you mean Min but say Max? Or did I mis-apprehend?" Usually the mistakes are corrected with text annotations and the corrections are appearing in a more timely manner, but you just never know. I guess it keeps me on my toes;
- At the beginning there was NO feedback mechanism. If I had a question or brain-fade on something there was no way to get clarification, except from other students who might be just as clueless. Now there is a forum which some apparently official folks monitor sometimes, so, if I can phrase a question correctly I have a small chance of getting an accurate explanation. Part of the small is that most questions seem to overlap with the Homework or Exam questions and thus can't be answered until after the fact.
- That homework thing... Jah, I make stupid mistakes. If there was a recourse I could possibly make the point that it was a stupid mistake and get some credit for at least thinking correctly. Of course I still can't figure out why I care about getting a grade anyway.
- Style -- Some things are just annoying...
- Definitions. Definitions. Definitions. Especially Partially Observable Stochastic Rationality. I'm still not sure which way the wind blows on some of that because the definitions are, and are admitted to be, a bit arbitrary. The one that still galls me is calling a card draw Partially Observable (rather than Stochastic) because the deck is already shuffled but in an unknown order -- so reshuffle the deck each time, eh? Then being graded on my understanding;
- I mentioned Professor Thrun's habit of using lecture Quiz questions to introduce the next lesson rather than reinforce the current material. This is supposed to encourage me to think for myself. It doesn't;
- I also mentioned his delight in tedious arithmetic. I'm really not sure if there is a better way to pound in the concepts. I do understand more of what I'm doing now, so maybe tedium works;
- I think many explanations would have been clearer if the class was taught by a grad student who was closer to the horrors of learning it for the first time. For me, Logic, Planning, and Particle Filters were explained in a rather high level manner and then Homework or Exam questions asked for specifics and mechanics that were taken for granted.
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