Stott Parker did a great job providing MSOL (Master of Science On-Line) students a great introduction to machine learning techniques. Because the student body has such diverse backgrounds, he had to go back to basics, including a really nice tutorial/refresher on linear algebra. This was actually really important because he spent time on a variety of ML algorithms that are based heavily on linear algebra.

His lectures were always interesting even though they were rarely funny. He had an amazing ability to explain his subject matter clearly even though he had no audience present when he recorded. This turns out to be a much bigger deal than I would have expected, and it's not something everybody can do. If you have the opportunity to take an on-line class from him, he's one of the best at this format.

CS 249 (Data Mining)
Prof Parker is a good teacher. He is really concerned that students learn what he is teaching and make use of it in the real world.

A lot of what he teaches is using the projector and as it involves code I would recommend sitting in one of the front benches. If you sit in the back you will not be able to see the small font on the terminal.