«

[Japo]

Stanford is offering more free courses for the Winter quarter:

Computer science
- Computer Science 101.
- Cryptography.
- Game Theory.
- Human-Computer Interaction.
- Machine Learning. This is the same as ml-class.org, offered again for Winter.
- Natural Language Processing.
- Probabilistic Graphical Models.
- Software as a Service.

Entrepreneurship
- Lean Launchpad.
- Technology Entrepreneurship.

[Japo]

Well so I did the three Fall courses. I plan to take two or three of the upcoming ones. Most of them would have been started, but all have been delayed.

http://www.coursera.org/

[Lulu_Jane]

I'm signed up for the technology entrepreneurship. Hopefully I'll actually do it this time.

[Japo]

There's somewhat of a schism:

• Thrun's private initiative:
  https://www.ai-class.com/
  http://www.udacity.com/
  http://www.knowlabs.com/

• Stanford's reaction:
  http://www.coursera.org/

• And then there's the MIT's reaction:
  http://mitx.mit.edu/ (just an announcement so far, has RSS)

Some background: the guy who started all this is Professor Thrun (personal website). He also works at Google and he's the guy who won DARPA's Grand Challenge and programmed their famous self-driving car:



Some other Stanford professors did think it was a terrific idea, but it wasn't until the conspirators had started the whole thing that Stanford's board got wise to it:

http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechcons...academic-level

Last year, Stanford University computer science professor Sebastian Thrun — also known as the fellow who helped build Google's self-driving car — got together with a small group of Stanford colleagues ...

"Within hours, we had 5,000 students signed up," Thrun says. "That was on a Saturday morning. On Sunday night, we had 10,000 students. And Monday morning, Stanford — who we didn't really inform — learned about this and we had a number of meetings."

You can only imagine what those meetings must have been like, with professors telling the school they wanted to teach free, graded online classes for which students could receive a certificate of completion. And, oh by the way, tens of thousands have already signed up to participate. ...

When I ask Ng how Stanford's administration reacted to their proposition, he's silent for a second. "Oh boy," he says, "I think there was a strong sense that we were all suddenly in a brave new world."

Ng says there were long conversations about whether or not to give online students a certificate bearing the university's name. But Stanford balked and ultimately the school settled on giving students a letter of accomplishment from the professors that did not mention the university's name.

Emphasis added.

And hear this: Stanford has made Thrun renounce his tenure (a brave and admirable leap of faith in his vision) to continue with this. There have been many qualifications to this news, but that's the gist of it.