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Stanford To Offer Free CS and Robotics Courses

Posted by samzenpus on from the now-everyone-will-know dept.

DeviceGuru writes "Stanford University will soon begin offering a series of 10 free, online computer science and electrical engineering courses. Initial courses will provide an introduction to computer science and an introduction to field of robotics, among other topics. The courses, offered under the auspices of Stanford Engineering Everywhere (SEE), are nearly identical to standard courses offered to registered Stanford students and will comprise downloadable video lectures, handouts, assignments, exams, and transcripts. And get this: all the courses' materials are being released under the Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license."

2 of 247 comments (clear)

  1. MIT has many more... by fortapocalypse · · Score: 5, Informative

    Good info on Stanford. In addition, don't forget that MIT has had many more courses available for a good while now:

    http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/courses/courses/index.htm

    And many schools/universities have their material online. Try Google.

    Those with thin wallets and empty pocketbooks can get a decent education as long as they have the time, the will, and with free access to a computer (via public library for example).

  2. Re:What a load of BS (CS) by pkaeding · · Score: 5, Informative

    I'm afraid I have to disagree. Lisp and Scheme are excellent languages for beginning computer science students. Functional languages in general are great for beginners. Mutation is a difficult thing to wrap your head around when you are starting out; functional programming is much easier when you have no other exposure to programming.

    In high-school algebra, you learn that a function f(x) takes a single number as input, and returns another number. This idea of 'functions' translates perfectly to functional programming.

    Functional programming also teaches kids who may have limited experience in other languages to think differently. If you are used to loops, you learn recursion. If you have never used loops, recursion makes sense as a way to simplify a complex problem.

    I think that using C and Java to teach these concepts will introduce too much confusion, especially if these freshman students search Google when they get stuck with a problem. The solution on Google will be so much different that what they learned in class, and for a good reason.