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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...
"The Fourier Transform and its Applications" WTF!!
My employer's lawyers protect us from the liabilities of open source and I don't see the in-house tools I'm forced to use *anywhere* on Stanford's course listing!
How *exactly* are we supposed to find people with expertise in our proprietary crap if no one out there is teaching it???
Universities are soooo out of touch.
No, no. Don't worry about it. To view the lecture video, you have to install Microsoft Silverlight. So in other words, the asking price is too high for many.
I'd say an in-class experience, including talking with an instructor, graded homework, and the recognition (towards a degree) is quite a bit of value that ISN'T included in the online version.
Their two different beasts.
RTFA! The freeloaders don't get Stanford credit for the free courses.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
So what is better? Something free that everyone has access to or something that only the rich and privileged can attain? I would think that most \.ers would be cheering this since its akin to open source.
jsut athnoer menagiensls ltitle psrhae for you to dcoede. Why do we wtsae our tmie dnoig tihs?
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.
Nope, you can also get the video from YouTube, Itunes, Vyew (not working with Firefox 3.0), and WMV and MP4 video files that are being torrented. I feel like the bases are covered pretty well.
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).
Are you kidding? When I was at Stanford (a ways back now) most of the intro class lectures were big enough that non-students could easily sit in on any lectures if they wanted (and I would recognize several who did repeatedly - some of whom were clearly not "all there"). I bet you could even turn in the homework and take tests in many cases... and occasionally they'd probably be oblivious enough to grade it and give it back.
I looked at the courses, and (scarily?) I recognize a few of the profs/lectures from over 15 years ago - they definitely picked some of the best for this program (the CS106A lecturer was my CS106A TA back then, but he was a fantastic TA ;)
Anyway, as a former undergrad, I hope people do use this resource! The more quality education/teachers available to anyone who wants it the better.
I'd say an in-class experience, including talking with an instructor, graded homework, and the recognition (towards a degree) is quite a bit of value that ISN'T included in the online version.
Their two different beasts.
Totally agreed. I see that someone learned his homonyms via an online course.
As an actual Stanford student, I can shed some light on this. The official statement from http://www.stanford.edu/dept/registrar/bulletin/4447.htm#main is:
Stanford does not have a standard course catalog numbering system. Courses numbered from 1 through 99 are primarily for freshmen and sophomores. Courses numbered from 100 through 199 are primarily for juniors and seniors; some departments, however, offer courses numbered from 200 through 299 for juniors and seniors. Most courses numbered 200 and above are for graduate students; no graduate career course is numbered below 200, and all courses above 300 are for graduate students.
Economic theory is almost always wrong when it predicts individual human behavior.
Kid, we don't pay the fortune for fancy college's teaching materials, we pay the fortune for their paper with their stamp on it. Welcome to the real life.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
Why?
What a strange response. I've read your comment three times now, and I still don't get it. That is, I don't get it because I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt; it seems like you're advocating for long-dead Social Darwinist tripe. But that couldn't possibly be the case, as you are one of those on the "right" side of the curve, right?
You act as if this is your Harrison Bergeron fantasy (in which you are the protagonist, of course). This isn't the government forcing Stanford to admit cretins! It's just a school sharing part of their curricula on the web.
If "you" are a member of "us", count me as a member of "them".
Yay Stanford. Using the web to its potential for making civilization a little better for all of us. What's not to like? And what would we possibly have to gain by preventing people from learning?
Slashdotters are largely made up of people on the far right side of the bell curve distribution of intelligence.
Have you actually read any of the comments on slashdot?
Their two different beasts.
Totally agreed. I see that someone learned his homonyms via an online course.
I concur. Someone learned their vocabulary via an online course. Their/There/They're are homophones (same sound). Polish/polish and read/read are homographs (same spelling). Bank/bank and stalk/stalk are homonyms (same sound and same spelling). Homonyms are both homographs and homophones.
I attended my university linguistics courses in person.
Slashdot monitor for your Mozilla sidebar or Active Desktop.
Very much like life, there is a default purpose and a self-determined purpose to a university experience.
Going to a university solely for the degree is like living solely for the purpose of having kids: you'd fulfill the purpose the system set out for you, but you'd miss out on any chance at developing and expressing your own goals.
Simply by replying, and specifically by your spelling, you are NOT "them". You can benefit by a higher education that focuses not only on the practical application of our knowledge base that would be applicable in earning a respectable living doing a productive job (ie. a tech school), but on an education that uses theoretical considerations to go beyond simple application, towards synthesis that leads to new applications, new knowledge.
A simple example is the requirement that algebra must be passed in order to get a high school diploma... I would argue that for a fairly significant portion of our society, passing an application-focused class such as auto shop is much more valuable and pertinent to graduating from high school than passing an algebra test. I grew up with a number of people who can't possibly grasp algebra, but who benefited greatly from various "tech school" high school courses, got their high school diplomas, and got decent jobs right out of school. They would have been very poorly abused by any system that required them to pass algebra to get their diploma, and they never would have graduated if the school system in place at the time had cut shop class in order to attempt to force these below average students to pass college-prep courses. They were much better served by being offered application-level courses that taught them practical skills that led directly to productive jobs.
One friend of mine was particularly affected by the current philosophy that no student is "below average", and that all students deserve a college education. He got all the opportunities anyone could imagine including a free ride to a good university based on an intercollegiate athletic scholarship, and he was completely unsuited for the academic challenge. When he failed out of college, he found himself unsuited for any job other than fast-food shift supervisor because his high school refused to recognize that he was "below average", and refused to tailor his education towards something he could have actually used. He ended up with few practical skills since they forced him into math courses that he barely passed instead of letting him take skills-application courses, and was unable to get a job that paid well enough to support himself.
That's what I'm talking about when I say as slashdotters we should temper our response to these education opportunities. They are not the answer to all our problems, because the vast majority of people in the US are incapable of benefitting from the and trying to tailor high school education to force the no-shit 50% of students who are "below average" to go to college, is a gross injustice. We need to recognize that an awful lot of people have absolutely no use for a Stanford level of education, and ensure that rather than trying to force them into a particular college-prep track that they are not prepared or capable of following, we should provide application-level educational opportunities that lead to jobs, not a future involving washing out of college and ending up on the street with a bruised ego and no practical education that they'll find useful in finding a job they can handle.
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.
Just a few lines lower on any page, there are links to view the same video in other formats including,
1. Youtube
2. iTunes
3. Vyew
4. WMV Torrent
5. MP4 Torrent
for instance, this MP4 torrent available from this page.
I bet you say that to all the nerds... ;)
I share some of your opinions, but I arrived at them from a different place. I've never feared greater access, but I have been saddened by our system's failures. I think these failures are more complex than the paradox of Lake Wobegon's test scores, though. Whatever the failures are, and whatever the details of the failures, it seems to me like putting material on the web is an excellent bypass.
I think that the missing great students are still a bigger problem than an abundance of under-equipped students. Coping with some more of the latter is worth it to catch more of the former. In any case, putting this material on the web can feed the lonely minds of those that didn't make it, for reasons other than lack of intelligence.
I totally agree with you about providing more of what you called application-level education; both for the lives of those who just need to learn a trade, and for the institutions who could put more effort into theoretical considerations. But I also get serious warm-and-fuzzies thinking about all humanity being able to access stuff like this someday.
This is in the spirit of a true university. A university is "supposed" to be a place for learning and furthering the knowledge acquired by humanity, not a money making scam or a means of positioning yourself in the dominance hierarchy.
I'm glad that whatever the motivation, education is being opened up to bright, eager people who can't get access to the same quality of teaching as in Stanford/MIT etc. ADUni was also an attempt to do this same thing and really deserves kudos.
Hope more comprehensive lecture material (including video lectures) are released eventually for other subjects too. Why fleece students when good universities can always earn money via grants and patents.
They also have to be 35.
Shouldn't it then be: "Their are a plural possessive pronoun" ?
(;-))
Wait, so university is about credits and not about *learning*!?
I think it's more about verified learning. When they give you course credits or a degree, they're saying "we know that Anonymous Coward is at least somewhat competent at X". And while knowledge may be free, verifying someone's level of knowledge takes work (if done right), and is rather expensive (partly because they can, partly because they need money just like everyone else).
The people paying get a degree. The people taking the free courses don't.
Do you get angry when you buy a book and then find out your local library loans the same title out for free?