CSEE Colloquium
Experiences Teaching Thousands Online
Professor Michael L. Littman
Computer Science, Brown University
1:00pm Friday, 26 October 2012, ITE 227, UMBC
Last Fall, a pair of well-respected computer scientists at Stanford offered their AI class for free to people everywhere via the Internet. Over 160,000 students signed up, spurring a worldwide conversation on the impact of online teaching on higher education and sending universities throughout the US scrambling to announce initiatives in this space. I had the good fortune to teach a class for one of the startups and will share my experiences.
Michael L. Littman is a professor of computer scientist at Brown University. He works mainly in reinforcement learning, but has done work in machine learning, game theory, computer networking, partially observable Markov decision process solving, computer solving of analogy problems and other areas. He has held faculty positions in the computer science departments at Duke University and Rutgers University, where he chaired the department from 2009 to 2012. In the summer of 2012 he taught a massive open online course (MOOC) on graph algorithms.