

OpenClassroom: Free video courses from Stanford University - hoffmang
http://openclassroom.stanford.edu/MainFolder/HomePage.php

======
barik
It seems that there is a digital divide between universities that "get it",
and universities that don't. I applaud universities like MIT and Stanford for
opening up education for everyone.

Other universities, like NC State and Georgia Tech, give platitudes about
equal access to education for all but then fail to deliver. At the end of the
day, this is because online education for them is not about equality, but
rather, it is about creating a revenue stream for the institution. These
institutions will charge thousands of dollars for what is effectively access
to pre-recorded videos, with a Teaching Assistant that grades your work to
provide that key "certification". If you just want to learn for the sake or
learning, and aren't concerned with having an official credential, you're
simply out of luck.

For example, I find NC State's policy simply draconian:
[http://engineeringonline.ncsu.edu/forms/EOL%20Course%20Downl...](http://engineeringonline.ncsu.edu/forms/EOL%20Course%20Download%20Form.pdf)

"Accordingly, this policy also relates to the downloading of video lectures
for Engineering Online classes. You are allowed to download a lecture and to
keep it on your machine until the end of the semester you are enrolled in the
class. After this time period, you must delete the downloaded files."

That's the type of contract I expect from the MPAA, not an educational
institution. Contrast this with MIT OpenCourseware, which provides lecture
notes, exam, and videos without any registration:

<http://ocw.mit.edu/index.htm>

So, good job MIT and Stanford. Hopefully other institutions will follow your
path.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Yes, I love this model where you can effectively educate yourself for free, or
train for a certification without paying. Then you can Suntzu it (as it were)
and only pay to take exams for a course you know you'll pass.

~~~
delinka
Allow me to highlight that this works for _certifications_ and not degrees.
For an actual degree, you'll still need to pay through the nose, meet
attendance requirements, and complete coursework before you may sit for the
exam.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
I've done home based learning at degree level with the Open University in the
UK (they're a degree awarding body). It's possible to not have any contact
throughout the course and just turn up and sit the exam. Tutorial sessions are
not compulsory though many (possibly all, I don't know) courses have a
continuous assessment element.

I wouldn't describe the fees then as 'paying through the nose', certainly not
in comparison to professional IT certifications.

------
nkassis
After the first week of the AI and Machine Language class I'm truly impressed.
I feel I'll be putting more effort into this than most of my classes in
college simply due to the metrics and ease of UI for the in video question.
Now they should add achievements like for the ML class, "3 perfect first
attempt"... or stuff like that ;p

Also anyone knows of a good online video lecture on Computer graphics?
Something with some accompanying material?

~~~
riffraff
Same feeling here, and actually I felt frustrated with the AI class. After
looking at the others the lack of a larger standalone "exercise" section was
disappointing.

~~~
nkassis
Yeah I like the setup for the ML class better. You can easily make 100 in the
class and all that counts is learning the material which I find much better
system.

And by letting you redo the assignment they get to actually see if it takes
someone 1,2,10,50 tries to get them all right so they can figure out the
problems.

------
ashamedlion
I really respect Stanford's willingness to share content for free. They seem
to have let go of the elitist notion of the past wherein content is worth so
much to universities. This feels like they actually want people to learn.

~~~
iqster
Bump. In the past, I've been through Stanford's IOS dev course and ML course
(via iTunes). Currently, I'm doing the AI course. It is truly amazing that
Stanford is giving away this content for free.

As an academic, it makes me wondering how education will change over the next
10 years. If a prof gives a fantastic lecture in the Fall of 2010, does he
need to repeat himself in 2011? I had the experience of lecturing an undergrad
course in Programming Languages many years ago. Honestly, the content didn't
change much (I was teaching Scheme, ML and Prolog). I did get a bit better
answering and anticipating student questions. I'll admit that in some cases,
content must be updated fairly frequently. For instance, Prof. Ousterhaut's
web app course on the site seems to be covering Rails 2.x.x. Teaching it
today, perhaps 3.x or 3.1 would be used.

However, when I look at how well the community can improve the quality of a
lecture, it blows my mind. In the Stanford AI class, for instance, the
lecturer made a slight error where he defined the admissibility criteria of
the h function (estimated cost) in A* search as less than the true cost rather
than less than or equal to the true cost. Well ... this was quickly spotted by
students and a correction was promptly issued. This blows my mind!

This also has the potential of making things worse on the supply side of
education. In the last decade, it has undoubtedly gotten harder to get a
faculty position in Computer Science. Will the advent of online education make
that situation worse? As someone who has been an educator in the past, my
personal opinion is that education should be available for free. But, I worry
that it might not be sustainable.

~~~
dpatru
> I worry that it might not be sustainable.

The rise of Wikipedia with the concomitant decline of commercial, paper
encyclopedias offers some insight into the future of education. In the future,
there will be more education available and it will be very cheap.

What will not be sustainable anymore is a career in education where one gives
essentially the same lecture for 30 years but gets paid as if he has created
an entirely new lecture every year.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
> _What will not be sustainable anymore is a career in education where one
> gives essentially the same lecture for 30 years but gets paid as if he has
> created an entirely new lecture every year._ //

It will be interesting to see how this affects the development of subjects
like mathematics. Without the income from teaching students how will the
capitalist system maintain academics in research? Who will pay if education
effectively becomes free?

Don't get me wrong. It's fantastic that a brilliant lecturer can now lecture
to as many people who choose to watch the video - that's not quite educating
them but almost. I see that an institution then can train millions of people
using a single good lecturer and a system of auxiliaries, admin staff and
what-have-you. But then what of those who were doing [not directly/immediately
commercial] research supported by their lecture positions.

~~~
wtallis
Math is probably the subject least at risk. Every prospective engineer or
scientist needs to learn a lot of math, and a significant fraction of those
students will be unable to master the subject by simply watching videos. That
means that there will always be a significant demand for real, live math
teachers.

~~~
thomaslangston
Agreed. 1-on-1 teaching seems to be very useful to many students especially
for math. $20/hr. math tutors fill the tables at my local public library.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
> _$20/hr. math tutors fill the tables at my local public library._ //

Do you mean your libraries have classrooms for private tuition? I'm not
familiar with this sort of thing. In my country private tuition happens at the
tutor or students house.

~~~
thomaslangston
Nope, we have tables that fill the open spaces. These are first come, first
served are available for tutors, project works or studying, or just general
reading space.

------
brackin
This is incredible, all of this makes me think higher of Stanford as an
institution. The fact they're both giving all of this away for free and that
they're putting so much of it up. I was impressed after the first two but now
they're adding more and making finding the courses more structured.

Khanacademy showed alternative education methods, Stanford didn't try and
discredit services like this, instead they put many of their courses online
too. I'll be going through these courses later.

------
dpatru
There are tens of thousands of students taking these courses. There's probably
a business opportunity here. How could a startup make money by hiring, say,
one hundred of the best Machine Learning graduates?

~~~
webspiderus
the Machine Learning class (at least for the Stanford students) also has a
project component, so I'm sure a startup could see some use even from just
having the graduates work on their problems for a research project, if nothing
else! personally, I ended up doing two projects last year with data from my
previous internship, and I think it's a great way to both have interesting
problems and useful results.

~~~
bartonfink
I'm somewhat sad that the ML course project isn't an option available to the
online students. I know there's no way something like that could scale, but
I'd still like to have more validation that I know what I'm talking about than
'yes, you can answer ?'s and do programming assignments.'

When he found out I'm taking this course (he's a Stanford alum from the 90's),
the CEO of ThisOrThat, the startup I work for, was really excited. He said I
could use production data for a project if necessary, and gave me some ideas
for possible ML applications that would be really helpful to have on the site
(fraud detection, a reputation system, etc). I'm looking forward to this more
than anything I did in college or grad school, and I actually feel like I'm on
the young side of 25 again.

Even so, I'd really like having someone who groks ML giving me pointers after
the fact. 3 months just doesn't seem like enough time to do a thorough dive
into the material for me to say with confidence "I understand the background
and problems in the field of ML".

~~~
webspiderus
I definitely agree with your last point - part of the reason why I decided to
take a machine learning class again from Prof. Ng was because I still had a
sense of unease that I wasn't quite getting the topics that would really be
important when I'd implement machine learning algorithms (whatever they end up
being).

Mostly though, I'm just hoping I can find a place to work with plenty of ML
people to learn from :)

------
webspiderus
I'm actually taking the Applied Machine Learning class at Stanford, and I'll
be honest - I'm a little disappointed that most of the content is delivered
through video instead of lectures. I find it difficult to actually watch
through the videos, mostly because there's no easy way for me to skim or jump
around the content. I've actually ended up using the notes from the class I
took last year (<http://cs229.stanford.edu/materials.html>) if I need to
refresh my memory on the finer points.

Prof. Ng did remark that they decided to switch to videos because they saw
dropping attendance rates in the past as students begin to utilize our remote
learning solution later in the quarter (i.e. get lazy to go to class), but I
wish that there was also a transcribed version of the videos that could be
made available for people who prefer learning that way.

~~~
Rotor
Personally I don't see the video format being a huge drawback, although having
the in-video quizzes in HTML5 would be fantastic for tablets. It makes it
convenient to learn the content and there is always the ff/rewind buttons. You
can take notes.

These remote learning classes from Standford are somewhat new and there is
some experimentation taking place, I would rather not see these classes be
canceled due to lack of attendance.

All-in-all a great experience, I hope more universities follow suit in this
open style of teaching.

------
algorithms
I think these Stanford courses are even superior to the MIT OpenCourseWare
ones. The quality of these videos along with the feeling that the teacher is
directly speaking to YOU is just impressive.

I also have to say, that I absolutely love the "khan"-Style presentations

------
natasham25
This is truly incredible. I have been trying to learn how to code, but am
having a hard time, mostly because I'm used to the university lecture style.
The Stanford Courses are amazing - the provide lectures, handouts, homework
assignments, reading assignments. It's just like being in class, and I'm
loving it. I have mad respect for Stanford and all the other colleges who are
being progressive and opening up their education to everyone.

------
pixcavator
I'd take a good book over this any day.

~~~
spacemanaki
Luckily it's not either/or!

------
drallison
This is not a comprehensive list of Stanford free course offerings. For
example, it misses the Stanford EE Computer Systems Colloquium (EE380),
<http://ee380.stanford.edu>. The website has archive of videos going back to
Fall 1996.

EE380 is a colloquium not a course, but many of the videos will be of interest
to HN readers. In addition to the archived talks, which can be viewed on-
demand, it's possible to watch the current (W4:15-5:30 Pacific) in a real time
webcast or attend live in person. A significant number of “not students”
attend live because there’s always something that the camera misses and
because you can ask questions.

The talk this week (Oct 19, 2011) is Professor John P. Weyant, MS&E, Stanford
speaking on _Integrated Assessment of Climate Change: dealing with massive
Complexity and Uncertainty_.

------
Casc
HN now has serious go to links for anyone posting on here asking where to
start in any of these subjects. This is extremely helpful, and I'm extremely
excited to start. The web applications is the most comprehensive course I've
seen.

------
Fliko
Every release of new free classes from Stanford or MIT just makes me giddy and
jealous of everyone that goes there. A lot of extra work goes into these
classes and I think it says tons about the awesome ideals that these
institution holds, which is very different from the ideals that the education
system I have been fighting for over half a year holds.

------
bomatson
Jackpot. Love all of these open learning programs, especially when supported
by universities. Definitely helping me learn RoR!

------
karls
truly amazing!

about the stanford ML course (i'm not taking any others) -- i especially like
the fact that i can always rewind, re-watch, pause-take notes-play, answer
questions during the "lecture" without the embarrassment of getting it wrong
the first time, unlike in real lectures. the forums are there in case of
questions/problems. the content is presented in a clear and concise manner.
and the length of each "lecture" is 10-15 minutes, no need to focus heavily
for an hour straight.

for people who have not seen the ted talk by salman khan
[http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/salman_khan_let_s_use_vide...](http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/salman_khan_let_s_use_video_to_reinvent_education.html)
which, along with increasing number of online courses from prominent
universities, suggests that the educational system is changing.

people who are behind this, i salute you.

------
sumukh1
Seems to be down temporarily: Fedora Core Test Page This page is used to test
the proper operation of the Apache HTTP server after it has been installed. If
you can read this page, it means that the web server installed at this site is
working properly, but has not yet been configured.

------
sidconn
Any idea if the database videos can be downloaded, just like the computer
science lectures

~~~
Hitchhiker
yes , they can be. There is a tab on the upper right corner if you are signed
on for the course.

~~~
docgnome
Does anyone know if these videos will be available after the courses are over?
I'm in the ai class and I'd like to do the others too but I don't have the
time to do all of them.

~~~
X-Istence
All of the videos for the AI class are available on YouTube.

<http://www.youtube.com/knowitvideos>

------
antimora
Too bad videos dont work in iPad

------
robyates
I'm actually taking Introduction to Human-Computer Interaction Design with
Prof. Klemmer and Design and Analysis of Algorithms with Prof. Roughgarden.
Interesting to see the videos of them teaching the exact courses from last
year.

------
Nic0
The content seems to have been removed, as it's now a 404 link. Does anyone
knows if the content has been place somewhere else, or simply removed
(temporary?). I checked it earlier, it seems to have some nice topics through.

------
sundar22in
In order to learn from Ivy leagues, you need not get into one. OCW started by
MIT early 2000 is a really good initiative, and I see that Universities which
are not open are not good like open source.

------
JTxt
403 Forbidden

It's down? I hope it will be back soon.

------
amnigos
Great for open content, hope all universities adopt this kind of approach.

------
untitledwiz
Fantastic! This is how education needs to be: open and free.

------
pitdesi
Other great free courses (many with video):

Carnegie Mellon: <http://oli.web.cmu.edu/openlearning/forstudents/freecourses>

Michigan: <http://open.umich.edu/>

Berkeley: <http://video.google.com/ucberkeley.html>

MIT: <http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/> <http://mitworld.mit.edu/>

Notre Dame: <http://ocw.nd.edu/>

Open University (UK): <http://www.open.ac.uk/openlearn/>

Fulbright (economics): <http://ocw.fetp.edu.vn/home.cfm>

Yale: <http://oyc.yale.edu/>

Khan Academy: <http://khanacademy.org>

~~~
zura
University of Washington (Computer Science and Engineering):
<http://www.cs.washington.edu/education/course-webs.html>

Some of the video lecture series:

CSE 421: Introduction to Algorithms:

[http://www.cs.washington.edu/education/courses/cse421/06au/v...](http://www.cs.washington.edu/education/courses/cse421/06au/video/index.html)

CSE P 501 Compiler Construction:

[http://www.cs.washington.edu/education/courses/csep501/09au/...](http://www.cs.washington.edu/education/courses/csep501/09au/lectures/video.html)

------
penetrarthur
Just wow

