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Stanford To Offer Free CS and Robotics Courses
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."
Does this mean one can now pad one's resume with "Studied at Stanford" or some such verbiage, without (much) guilt? Not an issue for me but for those newer to the field, it just might help...
What's the problem? If you read it a little more thoroughly you would see that they don't give any credit with the free classes. It doesn't hurt the paying students or lower the value of the actual degrees that paying students receive. I'm severely physically disabled and was unable to finish my EE degree back in 1993 because of health reasons. I doubt I'll ever go back to school. This is a great chance for me to at least finish educating myself, degree or no degree.
It's actually scary what the average slashdotter thinks makes a competent coder. When I suggested that I spent some spare time exploring and extrapolating FizzBuzz for fun (and testing!!! my solutions), I got called incompetent because it was an "uninteresting" problem. Instant gratification, instant results seem to be the flavour of the day...leading to poor untested code resulting from poor and/or incomplete analysis. I wonder how many "uninteresting" business problems some of these jokers would code poorly and/or incompletely without testing for the sake of saying they're quick and switched on.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
The reason why slashdotters go ape over this is that we might actually take a Stanford online course on robotics. That's why it's news for nerds. It's also worth noting that /. is probably heavy on Intuitive Thinkers, the kind of people who are good at math and not interested in teaching. As such, it is often hard for us to find good real world teachers (teachers tend to be Empiricals rather than Intuitives). Replacing teacher and book courses with online courses makes sense for us, since teachers are scarce in our subjects and we are online friendly.
Now, if you want to talk about how we could change the educational system to be more supportive of people who aren't going to go to college, let's start with making it easier to leave school earlier. The typical schooling in the US is 12 years of 180 days each. Move that around a bit, and you can get the same 2160 days in ten years of 216 days each. No more summer vacation to work the farm (and forget what was learned last year), but still about five weeks of vacation (which could be spread around the year in addition to the current four weeks of holidays).
For those who aren't going on to college, offer better apprenticeship programs. Companies will need to provide this, but the government can help with tax incentives and some adjustments to labor laws.