

New Stanford course - Anatomy - buddhika
http://www.anatomy-class.org/

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SandB0x
Arms only this time:

> This course will cover the region of upper limb. Subsequent courses will
> cover other body regions in a sequential manner.

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learc83
Now all they need to do is make an advanced paid version. Find some grad
students to run the thing so they can grade more complex assignments, and
answer questions.

It does make me wonder if this is a beta for a real online degree program.

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spacemanaki
Sebastian Thrun tweeted about a $2000 master's degree in CS and later about a
free one:

[https://twitter.com/#!/SebastianThrun/status/117131953714642...](https://twitter.com/#!/SebastianThrun/status/117131953714642944)

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gujk
That's puffery. These courses are not Stanford quality. The lectures maybe,
but not the homework and assessments, and there is no research at all.

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stordoff
Presumably the $2000 course fee would allow for more formal and rigorous
assessments to be used (e.g. hiring a test centre and giving a written, hand-
marked exam).

That said, I think the DB and ML class homeworks have been very good, given
the limitations they have.

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beilabs
This is exactly what my girlfriend was looking for.

She's done a degree in surgery in Mandarin. This would be perfect for her to
acquaint her knowledge of the body in english / latin terms. Thanks Stanford.

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sriram_malhar
Not to take anything away from this course, but I found Prof. Marian Diamond's
course simply incredible.

[Integrative Biology 131: General Human
Anatomy](<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9WtBRNydso>)

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antimora
How many of them are they going to put online?

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anrope
It bothers me a little bit that all these classes have their own domain names,
all of which border on spammy-sounding (e.g. generic-prescription-drugs.com).

I wonder why they aren't all under the same domain? All the classes I've seen
so far seem to be the same underlying app.

Maybe they're just doing it that way so people can farm HN karma.

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juhanic
hardly the same app. I'm in both the AI and machine learning classes and while
one has a full infra-structure for programming assignments and some other
video-playback that I haven't seen anywhere else, the other one uses youtube
videos with quizzes only at the end of the videos.

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ericlavigne
The AI class seems to be the exception. The AI class has a .com extension,
while all the others have .org extensions. The AI class website runs on
KnowLabs software, while all the others run on software developed by some
Stanford students last summer.

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ramkalari
I'm interested to see how successful these courses would be as you start
moving out of programming related areas. ML, AI and DB would interest many
programmers and has been a success but anatomy may not generate the same kind
of interest. Kinda how the activity is high on stackoverflow but comparatively
low on the other stackexchange sites.

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Mvandenbergh
Anatomy will draw in a lot of undergrads who want to go to med-school but
don't have anatomy classes at their universities.

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dmitriy_ko
math-class.org is still available. How long before domain squarters start
buying those?

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stephrosalia
There might have been a typo error for the start date. It says January 2011.

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Vivtek
Didn't you already take time-travel-class.org next year?

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chuinard
Why does Stanford keep registering /using these generic domains for their
courses? It comes off as slightly arrogant.

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badclient
_It comes off as slightly arrogant._

It's not obvious why you consider it arrogant so may be you should explain.

I personally think it is a good idea and keeps things simple. Combining them
together probably requires more coordination and thought for the product--and
at the end complicating it.

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Vivtek
It's asserting Stanford's tacit ownership of the concept of "class", in a way.
There's nothing there to indicate it's Stanford.

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callahad
SAAS Class (<http://www.saas-class.org/>) is from US Berkeley, not Stanford,
and is linked alongside all the others in each site's footer.

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Vivtek
Huh. I withdraw my argument.

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hendrix
What are they going to do for labs/dissections? What are they going to do for
exams (or equivalent)?

This is still a very interesting idea/class and I hope it succeeds 100%.

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ivoflipse
To apply anatomy to a human body, you must first know what to look for and how
to describe it. So I imagine they'll be spending some time on getting the
Latin terms down, which help reduce the ambiguity.

Example: how do you describe the direction your thumb is pointing in? In
anatomy they base it on the bones in your forearm, rather than saying
'outwards', because if you rotate your hand its no longer valid.

As for the testing: there are so many bones, muscles, nerves and organs in the
body that it will take more than 10 weeks to cover them all in detail.
Besides, knowing the name is one thing, knowing the function another.

A sample question I got in college: What are the effects of a unilateral
paralysis of the femoral nerve? Ten points of karma if you get it right.

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gujk
Gimped. Stiff leg. Limp.

