In the interests of SCIENCE! I signed up for the Machine Learning course that Stanford was planning to offer online. That apparently fell through, so I jumped ship to Game Theory instead. Which started as of a weekish ago. It’s an interesting idea, and I suspect that the existence of tests and problem sets will aid retention (in every sense), as opposed to e.g. Khan Academy, which has always seemed like a really cool idea but nonetheless never really occupied my time. Though I did download the new app the other day. Haven’t launched it yet.
I guess my reasons for signing up include:
- A curiosity as to whether I can still handle a traditional academic learning environment. I have warm, fuzzy nostalgia for my uni days, for the most part. And when I was at uni I was nostalgic over high school…. ad infinitum, I suspect.
- Determining whether I have any meaningful interest in furthering my academic credentials in future (I’ve toyed with the idea of getting a Masters or PhD from Stanford for a while; if it weren’t so damn expensive I probably have started by now… maybe this will convince me it’s worth the cost).
- A desire for betterment, and a realisation that a formal schedule and a familiar paradigm will be more likely to stick, long-term, than haphazard or irregular approaches.
At first glance I was tempted to sign up for a whole lot of the courses – basically all that looked at all interesting – but I decided against it in the end, reasoning that it wouldn’t do any real harm to just take one to begin with, and see what the workload really is, and how much I enjoy it.
