Learner Reviews & Feedback for Probabilistic Graphical Models 1: Representation by Stanford University

Great topic, the professor is a top expert in the field, but the grading interface badly needs an upgrade. It is not acceptable for students to have to manually hack JSON submissions just to get around grader errors.

Quite difficult, not much help in discussion forums, some assignmnents had insufficient supporting material and explanations, challenging overall, I thought at least 3-4 times to abandon it.

For me this was a difficult course not because of the material, but because of the teaching style. I don't think Dr. Koller is a very good teacher.

The audio is VERY VERY poor.

That makes it very hard to understand what Prof Kohler is trying to impart on us..

I often lost track

Fun topic. But the explanation of the mentor is somewhat vague and the material is sometimes outdated and misleading.

Concepts covered in quiz and assignments are not covered well in the lecture videos, can be much better.

Interesting and useful material, but I found the lecturer unengaging.

Good course, but the material really needs a refresh!

Started off well. Finished poorly

The content seems to be excellent regarding "what" is presented. But sadly the sound quality is rather bad: Sounds like an age-old valve radio with A LOT of dropouts. And Professor Daphne is an agile and therefore less disciplined speaker which lessens the understandability of her speech in conjunction with the poor sound quality furthermore. Especially for me as a non-native foreign english speaker it is very hard to follow. And now I am at one point in the course, that is "Flow of Probalistic Influence", where she explains a concept without explaining what is meant with the used underlying notions "flow" and "influence" which makes me difficult to understand what is going on. That means in my point of view that the slides are not sufficiently prepared. Although I'm very interested in the topic I am asking myself after the first view videos if I should continue or drop because my cognitive capacitity is for me to worthful to use it for the decoding of badly prepared and presented material. Ok, my decision heuristic in such cases is "Use the hammer not the tweezers!". Therefore I have dropped. Please improve the state of this class from beta to release. Then I will come back.

Quite abstract. A solid mathematical grounding, but largely devoid of practicalities. Optional exercises are quite basic, and don't get to the heart of the matter. Lectures are confusing, as undefined terminology come up out of the blue, and key concepts aren't clearly explained.

The course content is solid. The honours content is challenging and interesting. There's a couple of minor glitches that cause frustration in the PA's but nothing too earth-shattering. There's a lot of whining and whinging on the message boards, but take it with a grain of salt: the instructions to succeed in the programing assignments are complete and relatively simple, but you might have to dig around in lecture transcripts to put all the puzzle pieces together. The is GRADUATE LEVEL work, don't expect to be spoon-fed, and don't whine when you're not. I'd recommend the content to anyone. SO WHY ONLY 1 STAR? Because there is absolutely no support from TAs or Mentors anywhere. Nada. Zero. Zilch. They are asleep at the switch. If you expect any kind of interaction to expand your learning horizon then you will be sorely disappointed. I sure was. The lack of engagement from the TA/Mentor community takes what could have been a 5 star experience and drops it to zero. But I can't go that low, so 1 star it is.

This course is poorly structured, the material is poorly explained, the lecturer is going too fast and does not stress important concepts, video, and sound quality are below average. Do not recommend.

The structure of this course is an example of how not to teach mathematics. Examples before definitions and introduction of general concepts, lack of direction and "big picture" context, unexcusable things like "let's prove it by example"... It is very frustrating and almost impossible to follow.

Very rigid questions, very theoretical. Very poor instructor support. Content needs to be improved. Very disconnected approach.

very shallow explanation of important concepts

Lectures are awful.

A very dry course.

Muy malo