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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."
It's not the universities that are out of touch. It's your employers that are out of touch, and the multiple-choice generation of wannabe professionals who can't see past their first half-dozen paychecks. If you get the education that you appear to want, you'll be unemployable in five years.
Take it from someone who's been in the industry for 30 years and still going strong... you can't learn too much theory because theory doesn't go out of fashion the way technology fads and acronyms do.
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.
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?
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).
Except that you tend to get the reverse situation also; I've met CS majors who couldn't make a simple top level user app in a relatively generic IDE.
In principle I agree with your basic assessment, the core skills should be as you listed, but by no stretch should they be the limits of what is taught in colleges. From what undergrad programs I have seen you tend to get either one or the other, with a few exceptions here and there.
I am personally a result of an undergraduate Software Engineering program that covered a portion of the CS curriculum, and to a lesser extent CE, along with just about everything else in the realm of top level programming from an SE point of view.
In my opinion, software is one of the fields that benefits from the jack of all trades route and I believe more collegiate programs should follow this model.
"Now you know, and knowing is half the battle!"
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.
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.
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.