This is really fantastic news. I'm in the machine learning class going on right now and really love it. If you're at all curious about machine learning check out the class--it's very practical and hands on.

I'm curious about the probabilistic graphical models class--do folks familiar with the subject think it's a good followup to machine learning?

It's a good followup. Those models are widely used in computer vision, natural language processing, and other AI and applied ML areas, so those classes all go together.

To me it seems that NLP is the follow up to ML. I'm taking ML like you and NLP seemed to address the next question: how do you deal with text based data.

I think it's a good follow up to ai-class.com (Norvig/Thrun), which is largely based on probabilistic networks and planning. Looking forward to it :-)