I was MS CS at Stanford, and I agree with Ben's sentiment. I took CS221, and checked out ai-class for fun, and knew several people taking the on-campus version of CS221 this quarter. The short of it is that the online version is essentially the same as the on-campus version, and both fail to adequately prepare a student for further study in AI. It's great that Norvig and Thrun are willing to present this survey class to the public, but not at the expense of students who are actually in the classroom at Stanford and also footing the bill for this grand experiment.

Yes, the class was a fun introduction to AI. But no, it did not offer a deep and thorough theoretical foundation that I would expect from a Stanford class.