Learning Artificial Intelligence clip by clip: Post class reflections on the first online Norvig-Thrun-Stanford-Know Labs Artificial Intelligence course

The free on-line Artificial Intelligence (AI) course taught by Norvig and Thrun in Fall 2011 is likely to be a game changer in postsecondary education. The huge course enrollment demonstrates that there is a keen interest in this new type of open education, and that no campus-based alternative can be suitable for educating such large numbers of students. The AI course was offered as a sequence of granular, interactive video clips grouped into topics. Homework and exams were video-based as well. This paper provides a critical evaluation of the author's experience as a student enrolled in the advanced track of the AI course. The author is a tenured associate professor at a Canadian medium-sized, research-intensive university. Her expertise lies in Computer Vision, a topic that is closely related to Artificial Intelligence. The paper is based on participatory action research methods.