Yes, statistics!

I second this

Thirded. It would also be great if we can have a dashboard to track statistics and individual performance against the rest of class (percentile maybe). Does not necessarily have to be a leaderboard format. Also, would be great if you can make achievements/stars visible on a learners public profile - maybe something like Khan Academy? Thanks!!

The number of students enrolled is interesting, but the number of active student (those who are still watching videos, answering questions and doing homework) is more interesting.

We hear you (and agree)! We do want to provide these statistics, but don't yet have a good way to do this. It is on our shortlist of things to do, so hopefully we'll be able to provide this fairly soon.

Dave,
atlease u cn tel us the number of students enrolled & actually submitting their assignments!!!

I'm surprised this is so popular - whilst I can see that one might like to see how ones grades compare to the mean (or median, mode, sd, anova, chi, ... :-)), I can't for the life of me see what anyone would want any of the rest of this. It all seems a bit childish to me.

I am interested in learning more PHP programming.

along the lines of this question, I was in fact wondering what language will be used for "CS253 - Web Application Engineering"

I would love to see a c programming course.

I second this. I'm using textmate on OS X and I only paste and test the code on the udacity interpreter when i'm done.

Good suggestion, but an important caveat would be that students should always check that their code runs correctly when inserted to Udacity (I've had formatting issues when copy & pasting from IDLE).

Highly recommended. You could also suggest that people use other online interpreters such as: http://people.csail.mit.edu/pgbovine/python/tutor.html#mode=edit if they're facing problems with the Udacity one?

Wow, that link to the online interpreter is actually INCREDIBLE! Check it out!

I agree! Others should be aware of this. :)

Thanks, scubed! I ran my sudoku code through that tool and found a glaring error that, while giving correct answers, was still very wrong. Kudos!

@PeterUdacity I think it would also be great to add better error-checking features to the browser-based IDE.

I talk about adding such things daily. I don't set the engineering priorities sadly.

Woah... @scubed, that interpreter is absolutely fantastic!

Considering that the two current courses are being offered again I think it's safe to assume that the other courses, too, will be offered again

+1 ... That's a very good suggestion to avoid a lot of unnecessary discussions on the forum.

I agree with this too though it could be more easily avoided by just stating "it should return" or "it should print" instead of generic "it should output" with missleading examples:

some_function(3) => 3, 2, 1

which indicates print within function but actually requires you to print returned values

I have also been frustrated by this. For example I missed a quiz because I returned the results with print when it expected a return. I also missed a homework assignment because I didn't think to test a null string as the inputs for the function. Every none null input tested worked normally but a null string for one of the two inputs resulted in an infinite loop. So a list of test conditions the system grades with would be helpful so these type of issues can be avoided.

I have also noticed a lot of forum posts along the lines of I got this wrong but don't know why that having a set of test conditions while doing the assignment could reduce or prevent.

As a high school science teacher who is hoping to 'flip' my classroom and create a robust online component (vodcasting with quizzes, which Udacity does so well), I am also very interested in the details of Udacity's production process.

I would also like to have an answer to this. I love the way you folks have managed to put together your videos, and I'd love to know more about the system being used at Udacity

Actually, that seems rather brilliant to me.

If you let someone have the mindset that they probably won't be able to solve a puzzle, they'll be far less likely to solve it.

Alternatively, present a puzzle to a small army of learners - you have a decent chance. Even if it takes some collaboration.

James: Yes, I'm familiar with the story of "The Unsolvable Math Problem" ( http://www.snopes.com/college/homework/unsolvable.asp ) and it occurred to me that Udacity might deliberately be trying to recreate this.

I don't think it's brilliant though; I think it's selfish. The original story was an accident. That's very different from giving "a small army of learners" a problem that -- in all likelihood -- none will be able to solve. We're talking a lot of man-hours. The students' goal is to learn Python. And Udacity's goal is -- well, it's not quite clear yet -- maybe Udacity's founders/funders have some business interest that would be helped by a solution to the Collatz conjecture? Or they want to find the smartest person here in order to hire them? That would be fine if they disclosed it. But by what right are they obtaining thousands of man-hours to further unknown goals that the students never agreed to?

As I said, if the question was intended to help students learn Python, I'm fine with it, and would appreciate an explanation of what exactly I'm supposed to have learned. Otherwise the instructors should have clearly disclosed that the question is thus far unanswerable.

There's a hint in the question that points you to a XKCD comic on the problem. From there a Wikipedia search should give you the answer.

I can see how that was confusing. The Hint was actually a link you could click. The note about 0 not being a positive integer was a separate matter. Sorry about that! I can see why that was frustrating.

Peter: Oh! I had no idea that was a link. I thought it was a heading for "0 is not a positive integer." Cool comic. Yeah, that would have helped a lot. I'm curious how many people thought to click on the word "hint" when it's not obvious that it's a link (as it's not underlined). I guess we'll see, based on how many people upvote my original question.

So now I'll modify my request: if you're going to put an important hint in a link, please make sure it's really obvious that it's a link! Because I'm getting dangerously near that point where my friends stop calling to see if I want to hang out.

Sorry about that! It originally just had the Hint there and then I added the note about 0. I'll definitely be more careful next time.

Peter: OK, cool. Thanks. I'm feeling better now. :-)

Houston, is there a problem?

I have had a few times unsolvable homework problems in college due to errors from my professor. Not all problems in the real world are solvable. Maybe some students here can learn about "triage" of homework problems: I did this often in college.

Also, the hint was added later, I believe. And while there was an announcement saying that 2.6 had updated info, there was no mention that there was new hints on 2.5... thus I never checked that one for new info after I'd answered it and moved on.

A Google+ hangout could work...

With a maximum of 10 participants? We'll only need 9,000 hangouts. :D

You could get the hangout broadcasted live on Youtube, with people asking questions via IRC.

By the way, have you tried asking for in-person lessons on IRC? I'm sure some people would be willing to explain a few things.

Thank you for trying it out today through a Google+ hangout. How did it go?

I really liked the reference in Unit 1 also..

if you go to the python site there is a huge list of references that can be helpfull if you are stuck on a subject

I would also love a reference section for the other units beyond Unit 1.

I found that included reference and vocabulary to be very handy in keeping track of what we've covered so far. Like I've said, as a software engineer, I know how I would solve a lot of these questions using the full language. But I'm getting MUCH more enjoyment and knowledge out of this class by limiting my solutions to only the things we've covered. When put into that context, a lot of these questions are quite clever and really make you think.

Eric-I have gone to the Python site but the materials were not that useful since they use language that requires more knowlwdge than just a beginning student without any CS background would have.