I have been spending an hour a day for most of the past year learning Spanish for various reasons. While programming languages come easy to me, spoken languages do not. Anyway, I happened to come across an on-line course in Automata Theory offered by one of my Alma Maters, Stanford.
I’ve always been curious about Automata Theory but never took a course in it while I was in school (we are talking around 1970 here). So I took it as an auditor (free!). Let me say it wasn’t what I was hoping for, and I was left with a pretty low regard for the course and the program, even though it was free.
- The instructor did not exude any excitement for the material he was presenting. This is not a good sign.
- While the course did have a time schedule, as far as I could tell (more later) there was no one but me present. The lectures were given at least one year ago.
- It’s possible to sign up, do graded (by computer) homework assignments, and get a certificate upon successful completion. Being retired I have no use for a certificate. But, I consider this a “money grab”, you can’t even look at the homework assignments without signing up at a cost of about $100.
- There is a discussion section for students. Until I made a post, there were no others after the first week of last year’s course! Perhaps everyone dropped out last year and nobody but me is taking it this year. There was an ominous post from last year from a student complaining that no faculty appeared to be present and that he was getting no response to enquiries! He paid to sign up and was upset over this. I posted basically what I’ve said above and also received no response, official or otherwise.
I don’t know if it is just this one course or if the program itself is faulty (it’s run by edX, which is a consortium of universities that offer courses through them.
Anyway, after tomorrow my life schedule has mostly freed up, so I can get back to writing!