Stanford To Offer Free CS and Robotics Courses 247
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."
Re:What a load of BS (CS) (Score:2, Informative)
Re:I'd be pissed. (Score:5, Informative)
RTFA! The freeloaders don't get Stanford credit for the free courses.
Re:I'd be pissed. (Score:3, Informative)
MIT has many more... (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 [mit.edu]
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).
Not consequent. (Score:3, Informative)
To view the course material, you need proprietary software or patented codecs - Silverlight ? Check. Flash ? Check. Itunes ? Check. WMV, MP4 ? Yepp.
While this is truly an interesting development, I wish they would go the consequent route like Wikipedia (well, hopefully, (X)HTML5's video element will fix that).
Re:I'd be pissed. (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:did anyone notice the levels of the course? (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Viewing a lecture requires installing Silverlight (Score:1, Informative)
I just tried to bring up a lecture video and it asked me to install Silverlight.
Re:OpenSource University? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
To be fair to Stanford, it's not only the "rich and privileged" who have access to its degree programs. As of this year, Stanford no longer charges tuition [sfgate.com] for students whose family income is less than $100,000 per year. Most other "posh" American schools have similar programs -- Harvard, for example, waives tuition for families earning less than $60,000. In 2005, Yale announced that it would waive tuition for any musicians who wanted to pursue a Master's degree in music and were good enough to be accepted in the program. And so on.
Education really doesn't put up as many barriers in America as people think. It's the people who are rich who put up the barriers, whether they're going to university or not.
Re:What a load of BS (CS) (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.
Re:Viewing a lecture requires installing Silverlig (Score:5, Informative)
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 [stanford.edu] MP4 torrent available from this [stanford.edu] page.
Re:Viewing a lecture requires installing Silverlig (Score:3, Informative)
Not all the classes offer all the options, the natural language one is silverlight only.
Re:IQ bell curve (Score:3, Informative)
This pertains to this topic how exactly? You're just as bad as the law makers because you seem to think that focusing on multiple issues is somehow inherently bad or impossible. Hyper focusing on whatever issue the "people" care about is how we end up in these cluster fucks to begin with. Not everything is supposed to be some sort of idiot one size fits all solution that in the end results in more damage than it solves. It seems that to you "we need to help the below average" == "fuck over many other people by ignoring their problems." These are separate discussion with separate problems and solutions, with very little real overlap.
No one expects this to help the poor mentally disabled idiot who failed out of high school. It's not supposed to but there are many OTHER people who will benefit from them. If you want to help that idiot then go and post in some other discussion or what not.
Re:IQ bell curve (Score:2, Informative)
Of course you are right, but also consider people like me. I work in IT, but having not studied CS and living in Europe, the courses offered by a MIT and now Harvard enables me to learn and understand the theoretical underpinnings of CS from the comfort of my home. And I don't need a "certificate" afterwards, the personal and professional advantages I will gain from these courses will be reflected in my work skills.
And I'm sure there are lots of others with a similar story like mine. For us, such courses are a gift from - insert any paradise-like place here - and I don't care if the "vast majority" does not have a chance in understanding it.