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."
Hmm.... (Score:5, Interesting)
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...
Re:I'd be pissed. (Score:3, Interesting)
I just can't imagine why you'd be pissed. People taking a course for free obv. don't have access to the professors (80% of the value of college). Been through college yet? A weekend of talking over particularly complex math with a professor >> a year of watching online videos. And this is coming from a guy who LOVES MIT's open courseware.
At any rate, sunk costs shouldn't affect decisions. You paid the money and got the education (hypothetically), so sound economic theory suggests you shouldn't care shit about what happens after that.
Re:I'd be pissed. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:What a load of BS (CS) (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:IQ bell curve (Score:3, Interesting)
And how do you say that one man, over the course of 8 years caused what the USA is today?
Bush didn't cause the mortgage crisis.
Bush didnt get companies to heavily finance subprime lending.
Bush didnt encourage or discourage manufacturing sector to leave the country.
Economically speaking, what is doing us in is the unspoken deal with China. Yes, Clinton did initiate it, but I believe he did in the best interests of the USA. We already had large portions of our manufacturing moving out of the country, so we needed cheaper goods to offset the lower average wages, China offered to make cheap goods (cheap in price and quality). We bought them up, and created a trade deficit. They hold our treasury bills in lien for our debt to China. If, they were to sell them on the open market... Well..
Educationally speaking, we were already in the hole. Most of Europe encourages advanced education and pays for it. Higher wages due to education equal more tax revenue. Instead, our public universities jack prices up higher and higher, in that poor and middle class cannot afford them. These are supposedly public... They sure dont serve the public like the rest of the 1'st world nations do. And there's NCLB act. Even though Bush passed that recently, we still will not know the effects of it until 10-15 years. Might as well call it guinea pig nation.
Structurally speaking, our roads are decrepit. We have the last remnants of a rail system that has been left in the dust for 30+ years. Our infrastructure to move things around are vehicles, and therefore petrol increases hurt everybody. We have no real public transportation, even in big cities. There is no transportation between cities. Our broadband and high speed interconnects are taken over by monopolies who wish nothing but to extract every cent without providing improvements.
And even recently, we're seeing mergers in the financial market.In other words, companies are going bankrupt and they're merging to stave off future bankruptcies. I would make the unasserted claim that our country runs off of credit. If credit somehow becomes very scarce, our country will slow. Also, if we lose any more jobs, our country will falter.
What country would want to come to a place with 3'rd world education, 3'rd world infrastructure, and a failing economics system?
Re:IQ bell curve (Score:4, Interesting)
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 [look.net], 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 [look.net] 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.
Re:Not consequent. (Score:3, Interesting)
Looking at the CC notice at the bottom of the page (to Share -- to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work and to Remix -- to make derivative works), I don't see why you can't re-encode it in an open format and redistribute it so long as you give credit where credit is deserved.
Re:MIT has many more... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:What a load of BS (CS) (Score:2, Interesting)
I should clarify things. I love functional programming, particularly agent based-modeling concepts (objects that are purely accessed via functional message passing). But it took me 4 years to learn this. I think people learning programming need to "cut their teeth" on simpler, less oriented programming languages. Like I said, it took me 2 hours of thinking for one Haskell function. The extreme typing of Haskell in particular is irksome for learning.
That being said, beginners need to learn with something that will show them what everything is based on... i.e. the computer engineering side of things. The Glasgow Haskell Compiler was bootstrapped in the same manner every compiler is bootstrapped - it's written in C until it can compile itself.
I absolutely think every C.S. major should learn Haskell, Scheme, and Python. Just not at first. You need to crawl before you walk, and C is crawling. You bootstrap yourself up with languages in the same manner as the languages themselves.
Re:IQ bell curve (Score:1, Interesting)
Several errors in your argument I can spot right away:
1. IQ = Learning capacity. Obviously false, IQ only measures capability to solve problems, specially mathematical problems.
2. Below-average = hopeless idiot. Depends on where the average is.
3. Geeks are the only that will benefit from such material. Again obviously false. Anybody with a bit of curiosity can learn a thing or two. And this is also excellent reference material that writers or journalists can use.
4. There's a need for tempering. Why? It's a good thing that may help people, be happy with it.
Re:MIT has many more... (Score:3, Interesting)
...And then he turns out to be a good asset, and he gets some experience for his resume.
Now you have the option of giving him a raise or letting your competitors have him. Yes, autodidact education forces you to take some alternative paths, but the point is that the paths are there.
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I'd be pissed. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:I'd be pissed. (Score:1, Interesting)
Myself being an academic, answering "yes" would be philosophically wrong.
However, answering "no" would mean we are no longer needed, since students can now get free lessons from an ivory league school.
So why not just give me cyanide instead so that I may die like Socrates, dignified.