Artificial intelligence online, for free
A free online course at Stanford University on artificial intelligence, to be taught this fall by two leading experts from Silicon Valley, has attracted more than 58,000 students around the globe — nearly four times the size of Stanford’s entire student body.
The course is one of three being offered experimentally by the Stanford computer science department to extend technology knowledge and skills beyond this elite campus to the entire world.
The online students will not get Stanford grades or credit, but they will be ranked in comparison to the work of Stanford students and will receive a ‘statement of accomplishment.’ For the artificial intelligence course, students may need some higher math, like linear algebra and probability theory, but there are no restrictions to online participation. So far, the age range is from high school to retirees, and the course has attracted interest from more than 175 countries. The instructors are Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig, two of the world’s best-known experts in artificial intelligence. In 2005 Thrun led a team of Stanford students and professors in building a robotic car that won a Pentagon-sponsored challenge by driving 132 miles over unpaved roads in a California desert. More recently he has led a secret Google project to develop autonomous vehicles that have driven more than 1,00,000 miles on California public roads.
Norvig is a former NASA scientist who is now Google’s director of research and the author of a leading textbook on artificial intelligence. The computer scientists said they were uncertain about why the artificial intelligence, or AI, class had drawn such a large audience. Thrun said he had tried to advertise the course this summer by distributing notices at an academic conference in Spain but had gotten only 80 registrants.
Spreading the idea
Then, Carol Hamilton, the executive director of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence forwarded the email widely, and the announcement spread virally. The two scientists said they had been inspired by the recent work of Salman Khan, an MIT-educated electrical engineer who in 2006 established a nonprofit organisation to provide video tutorials on a variety of subjects via YouTube.
“The vision is: Change the world by bringing education to places that can’t be reached today,” Thrun said. The rapid increase in the availability of high-bandwidth Internet service, coupled with a wide array of interactive software, has touched off a new wave of experimentation in education.
The Khan Academy, which focuses on high school and middle school, intentionally turns the relationship of the classroom and homework upside down. Students watch lectures at home then work on problem sets in class, where the teacher can assist them one on one.
The three online courses, which will employ both streaming Internet video and interactive technologies for quizzes and grading, have in the past been taught to smaller groups of Stanford students in campus lecture halls. The two additional courses will be an introductory course on database software, taught by the computer science department chair, Jennifer Widom, and an introduction to machine learning, taught by Andrew Ng.
How will the artificial intelligence instructors grade 58,000 students? The scientists said they would make extensive use of technology. “We have a system running on the Amazon cloud, so we think it will hold up,” Norvig said. In place of office hours, they will use the Google moderator service software that will allow students to vote on the best questions for the professors to respond to in an online chat and possibly video format.
Although the three courses are described as an experiment, the researchers say they expect university classes to be made more widely accessible via the Internet. A small college might not have the faculty members to offer a particular course but could supplement its offerings with the Stanford lectures. There has also been some discussion at Stanford about whether making the courses freely available would prove to be a threat to the university, which charges high fees for tuition. Thrun dismissed that idea.
“I’m much more interested in bringing Stanford to the world,” he said. “I see the developing world having colossal educational needs.”
Hal Abelson, a computer scientist at MIT, who helped develop an earlier generation of educational offerings that began in 2002, said the Stanford course showed how rapidly the online world was evolving. “The idea that you could put up open content at all was risky 10 years ago, and we decided to be very conservative,” he said. “Now the question is how do you move into something that is more interactive and collaborative, and we will see lots and lots of models over the next four or five years.”
