Hi Jordi,
Sorry for the late reply, we were swamped in the last few
weeks, and I'm just catching up on my email back log.
It's very nice to meet you! First off, I must say that Octave
has been one of the best tools that we've used in our classes --
it has really enabled us to add very concrete and interactive
assessments for our classes, especially for the machine learning
class. I'm really glad that the Octave team is enthusiastic
about making it better / a potentially more integrated component
to Coursera courses.
The scripts for the machine learning class are still being
used and actually distributed as example scripts for our future
classes - it was a script I had put together initially for the
class (we went a few round trying to decide how to do
authentication, which explains the SHA1 implementation it comes
with) and it'll be great it we can work to improve it.
Off the top of my head, one of the bigger issues for the
script was with authentication / submissions over http. In
particular, Octave only supposed http (not https) and so we had
to come up with different solutions for authentication. We'd
prefer to ask the students to enter their passwords, but it
wouldn't have been good to send that over http. We ended up with
a simple "OTP"-like system for the submission. What would have
been ideal (in our mind at that time) would be a system where
students can enter their password into the Octave prompt (and
have the passwords be hidden / not show up -- we actually have a
few hacks for that by reading each character at a time), and
then this is transmitted securely to our servers for
authentication over ssl.
Another issue we had (sorry if I'm just throwing many things
out -- I really like what you guys are doing and by no means am
unhappy) was with Octave on Windows and path / include problems.
We often had users browse (chdir) to the directory where their
working files were, and from there they could run their homework
exercise. This sometimes worked and sometimes did not -- we're
not sure why and usually if they addpath it sometimes resolves
the situation.
p/s: We recently got an email from a student saying that they
had a problem running Octave on his Mac with Mountain Lion --
just thought I'd pass it on.
https://class.coursera.org/ml/forum/search?q=octave
is also a good place to look for issues and how other students
helped to resolve them.
Thanks so much for the great work with Octave and we're
looking forward to having even more classes on Coursera use it!
(Did you guys see a spike in users after the ml-class?)
Best,
Jiquan Ngiam
On Wed, Aug 8, 2012 at 10:27 AM, Jordi
Gutiérrez Hermoso
<address@hidden> wrote:
On 8/7/12 11:26 AM, Andrew Y. Ng wrote:
> I'd like to introduce our Director of Engineering
Jiquan Ngiam, who
> had developed the Octave submission script.
Hello, Jiquan. I actually remember quickly browsing your
script when I
took the first ML class in fall of 2011. Is it still being
used?
> Several of our classes use Octave, so we would indeed
be interested
> in exploring if there's any closer/better integration
that would
> make sense. I hope that you and Ngiam can connect!
Jiquan, let me point you to one of the original requests I
sent for
better communication:
http://octave.1599824.n4.nabble.com/Can-we-work-together-to-improve-Octave-td4631905.html
The issue we want to work with is when people say Octave
sucks or when
they fix Octave but we never know about it. I would like you
to
encourage Coursera students to directly talk to us in Octave
if they
are facing problems, in mailing lists or the bug tracker, or
at least
to funnel to us the frustrations they may experience with
Octave. For
the first ML class, I was in the forums doing this myself to
some
extent. We squashed one such Octave bug this way (about
scatter3 in
version 3.4.3, IIRC), and I think it's helpful for everyone
overall if
we keep the channels of communication open.
And I really do mean open. Notice how I'm CC'ing the public
Octave maintainers' list here.
I understand if Octave development isn't your primary
concern and you
don't want to follow the maintainers' list or our bug
tracker. If you
prefer to only talk to me directly, that's fine. I think,
however, it
would be better for everyone involved if we keep the talk as
public as
possible and involve everyone.
Thanks,
- Jordi G. H.