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

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?"

Maybe

[Hognoxious]

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.

Sweet, Comp Sci courses

[hamalnamal]

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".

The Crypto course with Prof Boneh

[TechyImmigrant]

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.

Re:Rough on the Adult

[Anonymous Coward]

I am taking the Crypto course myself right now... This is hard stuff...

The Good:
I am learning a lot of good stuff in this course, and already am able to apply the knowledge to my work life... The videos can be downloaded and played back offline. (Great if you ride the underground like I do each day.) In addition PDF and PPT versions of the lectures available in addtion to transscripts. The online forums are quite active. Lot's of 3rd party help available via Wikipedia and Google...

The Bad:
The Google+ groups and local study groups don't seem to be panning out too well.. It would not surprise me if the registered students are in the tens of thousands, but there are probably less than 50 active folks in the forums. (There are enough people to keep things moving, but one would expect more.) There just aren't enough examples given, and the papers refered too are often to technical to understand initially. (Needs a good open source textbook with lots of proofs, examples, and additional problems/answers.) The Math and Programing requirements were understated... (Programming became optional after class started tho...)

The Ugly:
The Notations in questions and expected formatting of answers during tests can be quite unknown until the first few folks try and report back what works and doesn't... You WILL spend at least 10 hours a week on this class, and quite possibly much more...

The main thing to remember is you DON'T have to pass to learn something, and it is likely you can take the class again if you really want too... I like it, and it is free, but it is like taking a night class, without the benefits of being accredited...