Education - Part 5

My friend Amy sent me a link to this free online machine learning course.  (Probably because of all my complaining in Education - Part 4 :-)).

So far the class is great!  It is an introductory level course, which assumes some knowledge of linear algebra, statistics and probability. 

So far, the class has covered linear regression and logistic regression using gradient descent. 

This particular class is fantastic because the lecturer provides lots of heuristics to aid actual implementations of the algorithms - such as feature scaling and choices for the learning rate in gradient descent*.  These kind of heuristics seem to be woefully missing from many academic papers, books, and courses.

The class doesn't officially start till the end of April, so I don't have access to homework yet, but found this great resource for open data sets.

Online Learning Vs. Classroom Learning
 
If the professor is going too fast for me to keep up:
In a classroom: I would frantically write down everything I heard (whether I understood it or not), and go through the notes after class to actually understand.
Online: I could pause the video and work through equations and concepts in real-time, before continuing to the next part.  Thus, when the professor starts the next part, I am ready to hear it.

If the professor is going too slow:
In a classroom: I would doodle in my notebook or fall asleep.
Online: I could fast-forward.

If I have a question:
In a classroom: I could ask it immediately
Online: I could look it up on Wikipedia.  If this topic is not documented somewhere online, I'm screwed.

If the professor mentions an interesting topic, but says it is beyond the scope of the course, and I want to learn more:
In a classroom: I could go to office hours.  If the topic is something the professor is researching, this leads to a thorough answer and, usually, an insightful conversation.
Online: Wikipedia

Summary:
Online learning lets a person learn at their own pace thanks to pause, rewind, and fast-forward features. 
Classroom learning allows a person to get detailed answers to their questions.

* See 4.7 of this link