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AFAIK no "official" number of enrolls in cs373 have been reported. Also, the hottest questions in the forum seldom raise more than 1K to 2K views. So, I went to check the information available to figure out what that number could be. Below are some findings. Notice that there can be people doing the course without being registered in the forum, but this is awkward, given the number of "incidents" related with grading bugs, etc... which are discussed here. There are 127 pages of users. Each holds 35 of them but the last, which has only 7 right now. So Regarding activity (karma points), only in user's page 73 (running down from 127) the karma starts raising above 1. This gives us approximately 2555 users with karma > 1, that is, only about 2500 have more than an infinitesimal activity in the forum. A karma=100 is in users's page 17, which gives about 600 users with a sensible activity (of course the limit=100 is empirical, use the one you want...) In the end, how many students will have submitted all of the HWs till now? Any guess? Does the "grading policy" of Udacity which now accepts an "exam-only grade", discarding homeworks (if worst than the exam grade), conveys the idea that it's enough to do the final exam to get the "diploma"? This is just "smalltalk", and a silly question for those who already submitted HW5 :-) In the end, the number of active students in "Programming a Robotic Car" is perhaps a hundred times larger than the number of those attending any other similar course in the world... UPDATE: 4695 users registered in the cs373 forum by 06 of April 2012. Probably the "saturation point" has been reached, since the final exam "closes the course" in 3 days. |
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we were talking about this in another post (http://www.udacity-forums.com/cs373/questions/32254/how-many-students-completed-the-course-and-any-chance-of-one-last-office-hours) and so far the number of views that final progrmming hw video got is 377. Also consider that yotube takes some time to update this number and there is still time to finish the exam http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=C-3UND3ylX4 So your point is that there are about 377 students enrolled here? Well i thought so untill some other people said that youtube doesnt count embedded video views |
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All this information should be made public, instead of having to resort to more or less informed second guesses. These courses are excellent at the technical level (and I'm grateful for that), but the non-technical aspects, that is, the values, principles and attitudes which guide the organizers, leave much to be desired. They get an A+ at the technical level, but an F at the non-technical aspects. There's much to be improved, particularly regarding transparency and fairness, for these platforms to really be the basis for 21 century education. They are actually doing a bad job at it. While they are evaluating us, they are also being evaluated. And sorry, they fail. (Down vote as much as you want/can. It'll show up at the end, so it'll be easy to find. And it'll also show up in other places, you can be sure about it.) I don't know what you mean about "transparency and fairness". The problematic issues raised along the course were the "grading bugs" in the "grading robots", which IMHO affected everybody. I don't see how the robots could be "unfair" or "opaque" - unless there were some kind of "black-lists" implemented, under a paranoid "conspiration theory" scenario, which IMO never happened here. So, at least specify the non-technical aspects you think can be improved. Any given so far... @jasa, you can search for my other posts and comments to comments to get an idea. Like in here: How many students completed the course. And any chance of one last office hours? 1
@mauro, your post is just non-sense to me.... please specify the non-technical aspects you are talking about Follow the links. Think. Do your own research. Think. Repeat. thanks for that, I have wasted 5 minutes of my life reading your non-sense comments. But I confirmed something.....You should go check yourself my friend... you might have some mental problems.... So fast? I'm afraid that's not enough time for thinking and doing your own research, Alvaro. If you read their (recently added) Privacy Policy, they mention that they are enabled to sell our Personally Identifiable Information along with the company in the future, without consent. In other words, information about you and me is now part of KnowLabs Inc's value. They are building value based on that, that is, they are turning you and me(or information about you and me, which is essentially the same), and about every other student, into a commodity. I don't know about you, but I don't like being treated like a piece of linen. I will not take any more courses with them, and I suggest you to do the same. I'll also politely ask them to remove all the Personally Identifiable Information they have about me. 1
I hear you, Mauro. I completely agree with you @Christoph... I don't like being the product, at all. I'm a person, not a commodity. They present themselves as revolutionizing education, and they are just merchants. That's what I dislike the most. That they are deceitful. And I think all this is very very damaging in the end. Much more damaging than pepper spray. I'm refraining now. Good bye. |
You don't have to sign up to the forums to read them though. For the AI course, I didn't even sign up to aiqus until after the course was over as I had nothing to say and I don't suppose I was by any stretch of the imagination the only one.
Now you are not acting the same way, @fnenu :-)
More seriously, the numbers I've shown are those available from the forum site: perhaps several geniuses in Probabilistic Robotics don't even bother to register in the forum, but I think those are small numbers.
Regarding the AI course (which I didn't attend) the number of registrations were 160000 and I think 20K or 30K have succeeded. I just found a site which conveys some information about the grading methodology pursued by Audacity, according to Sebastian's own words, and it was tailored after they (Sebastian and Peter Norvig) noticed the failure of the grading system being used in the first stages (weeks) of AI.
You failed to tell us which is your measurement gaussian error. Without it, I can not compute a prediction.
By way of comparison, 20,000+ (30,000+ ?) finished the AI course, but much less than 1000 of them were active on the forum aiqus.com at the end of the course.
Hence I would suggest that there is definitely a multiplier of forum users to course users and that multiplier is is of order 10-100.
As far as I'm concerned, I only signed up to the forums when I had a question that was not answered. I have a 50+ hr a week job, a long commute, and also taking a brick & mortar course (in addition to a slight overlap with the algorithms course) on top of other things I have to do. By the time I can actually get to the homework, most of the questions have already been answered. And, I did finish all homeworks and exams, on time. I didn't have that many questions overall outside of grading issues.
With that said, I am envious of those that have a lot of time to review the forums thoroughly, help others, answer questions, and discuss more profound implications of this material. Unfortunately though, there's no time. Thanks to all who did put in that time!
My point is, you're making a lot of assumptions here, but I would be interested in results of a survey about how people interact with the class.