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Coursera: Dozens of Free, Massive, and Open Online Courses

Posted by Soulskill on from the teaching-the-interesting-bits dept.

Titus Andronicus writes "Professors Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng of Stanford University announced a major expansion in the catalog of free, massive, open online courses being offered by the company they founded, Coursera. The subject areas include computer science, mathematics, and business. The providers include Stanford, Princeton, the University of Michigan, and the University of Pennsylvania. Even more courses are expected to be announced by competitors such as Udacity, MITx, Minerva, and Udemy — perhaps soon. Is this the future of education?"

3 of 101 comments (clear)

  1. Maybe by Hognoxious · · Score: 4, Interesting

    It might not be the future of formal education; it lacks the cachet, the QA, the brand recognition.

    For studying for its own sake, perhaps.

    --
    Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
  2. Sweet, Comp Sci courses by hamalnamal · · Score: 4, Interesting

    As I am about 50% self taught, very often I will want to learn about say "Probabilistic Graphical Models" but don't really feel like digging through all of the material out there to learn the basics before I can even think about understanding what articles and documents even say. This is one of the first free online courses sites I've seen that goes past "Hurr, Hurr, Learn what a variable is".

  3. The Crypto course with Prof Boneh by TechyImmigrant · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I've been doing the crypto course with professor Boneh at Stanford.

    1) It's not easy. If you aren't up on number theory and discrete probability, you'll be learning it.
    2) It's not 'Khan Academy'. This is college level stuff.
    3) It's free.
    4) It's quite a bit of work to keep up on the homework and grok all the lectures.
    5) It's good. I've been doing crypto for a long time. I'm learning new things that are useful to my job.

    --
    I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.