
Stanford announces 16 free online courses for fall quarter - ukdm
http://news.stanford.edu/news/2012/september/online-courses-fall-090712.html
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dhawalhs
Plug: I maintain a list of all the MOOCs over at Class Central -
<http://www.class-central.com>

Here is a list of courses(43 total, 28 new) that start in September :
[https://plus.google.com/107809899089663019971/posts/4nundLE1...](https://plus.google.com/107809899089663019971/posts/4nundLE1yVB)

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majke
Cool, but:

404 <http://www.class-central.com/In-Memory%20Data%20Management>

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dhawalhs
Thanks! Fixed.

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chris_p
And it's not just Stanford:

* 123 coursera courses from some of the best universities in the world in the next year: <https://www.coursera.org/courses>

* 14 Udacity classes: <http://www.udacity.com/>

* 6 edX courses from Harvard, MIT and Berkeley: <https://www.edx.org/>

Education is changing. About time.

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brianstorms
"Education is changing."

Exactly how? So a bunch of "courses" (i.e. video lectures and PDFs and web
pages) are put online. How is this a big deal? The University of Illinois
offered complete courses online, for full credit, in the 1960s. By the early
80s, thousands and thousands of students were taking online courses at
Illinois.

How is this throw-a-video-lecture-on-YouTube progress again?

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ramblerman
This isn't some mail-order-MBA-translated-to-the-internet, your Illinois
example is apples and oranges.

In fact it's not even about course credit. It's free. People from Africa,
South America, India, China and so forth are getting access to professors at
Ivy League universities.

That's a big deal in my book!

Yes, One professor can throw some videos on youtube, but this is a structured
environment to bring full courses to students. And more importantly, it's a
'hot' idea right now, it seems professors left and right are coming out of the
woodworks to join in.

So yes, education is certainly changing. It's hard to say where to exactly,
but something is stirring - and I think it's good.

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rimantas

      > People from Africa, South America, India, China and so
      > forth are getting access to professors at Ivy League 
      > universities.
    

And?

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arafalov
And this: [http://chronicle.com/article/Teaching-to-the-World-
From/1340...](http://chronicle.com/article/Teaching-to-the-World-From/134068/)

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jackowayed
People without a formal algorithms background should strongly consider taking
Algorithms from Roughgarden. I took that class from him, and it's a great
class that he teaches spectacularly. Great for the self-taught hackers whose
coding skills lag their formal knowledge of some of these quite-useful
techniques.

I'm probably taking Networking and Machine Learning for credit. I'm excited
that McKeown is teaching networking for the first time since I've been around
(not sure if he ever did). He's done some really interesting networking
research and usually teaches the more advanced networking class, which I've
heard great things about.

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suresk
I've been taking the other algorithms class (Sedgewick and Wayne from
Princeton), which has been interesting and informative so far.

I'll second your statement about the usefulness of these classes for people
who are self-taught - I'd been trying to go back to school to get a CS degree,
but working full-time and not being very close to any universities made it
difficult. While I won't get an actual degree from these online courses, they
have been really useful so far for filling in some gaps in my knowledge.

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enginous
My algorithms professor is using the videos from the Sedgewick and Wayne
course entirely as a way to present new material in place of lectures. He's
teaching their book and his view is essentially that his time in lectures is
better spent answering questions and interacting with the class than
introducing new material that has been extemely well presented on the web
already.

I can attest to the quality of Sedgewick and Wayne's lectures, and I have a
lot of respect for my professor's humble and novel approach to teaching this
course.

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enry_straker
You are damn lucky. It's a rare professor who focuses on the needs of the
student at the expense of his own ego inflation.

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crag
As a man of 48 years who does not have the time to "head" back to class I LOVE
all these courses. The receptionist in our office (she's 52) is taking the
Sustainability course on Coursera. That's a wonderful thing. I've already
taken the Cryptography course.

You may think it's only the younger generations benefiting from this trend in
education. I assure you, it is not. :)

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mukaiji
I highly recommend crypto & machine learning. Tina Seelig can also be quite
phenomenal but I only attended seminars of hers so can't speak about her full
course.

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at-fates-hands
I was eyeing the up the class on cryptography so thanks for the
recommendation. The Human-Computer Interaction class looks really interesting
as well.

This is just another great resource to supplement my experience. I also love
taking a deeper dive on topics I think will really help in my day-to-day
programming.

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waterlesscloud
I'm sure some folks here did the Technology Entrepreneurship course the first
time it was offered.

What was your experience like?

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mwilcox
I took it. It was pretty good, I learned a lot from all the lectures and
exercises, etc., but a lot of it is group work. Unless you go into it with a
team of people you know beforehand and actually have the time to put into it
every week, you might not find the experience that great. I was put into a
team of other people from my country and we had probably around 10 team
members at the start and that dropped to 2 by the end.

Also, in a class like this you really need that feedback from experienced
people like professors, but the majority on feedback is just handled by other
people in the class. We never got any professor feedback on our final demo and
weren't invited to the demo day, so felt a bit left out by the end, even
though we thought our idea and presentation was a lot better than some of the
other teams.

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benaffleck
Are there any decent projects created so far by the 'udacity / OCW'
generation? It seems like they should be out in the wild now.

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andreipop
I also wonder this. Being self taught through online platforms such as this I
spend a lot of time wondering how to prove their success at scale. In
particular for less tangible learning (i.e. things I cannot point to my github
account for)

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spatular
I've been wondering what's the point of online courses, at least in
disciplines, where there are good books available? E.g. you could very well
get the same (or deeper) knowledge of AI by reading Russell & Norwig book, or
algorithms from D. Knuth books. And text is mostly always is a better format
than video lectures.

As I understand, participating in a course will put some pressure to complete
most exercises and actually finish the course. You would also get some
automated submission checks and could extend CV in the end. Also courses might
mention recent discoveries that didn't find their way in books yet. Is that
all or I'm missing something?

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mark_l_watson
I think the experience of taking the classes is far richer than just reading a
good text book. Advantages: video lectures with "pay attention" embedded
quizes (that you can re-watch parts of as required), tests that you learn from
by taking repetitively until you get a good/perfect score on, class forums,
and homework that is automatically graded.

Really, no comparison.

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xwowsersx
I love that Stanford, MIT and others make their education available for
everyone online. Unfortunately, I'm finding it really hard these days to
follow along with a course, as opposed to following my own pace using whatever
other materials. So it's kind of annoying because the courses are pretty
current/relevant, but working full-time, etc doesn't always allow for
following along with a course.

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hntester123
Check <http://www.saylor.org> . IIRC their courses allow you to go at your own
pace. They offer many courses including but not limited to CS ones, and seem
to use Khan Academy / OCW material.

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xwowsersx
That looks great. Thanks a lot!

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egze
Does anyone know of similar courses for designers?

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reyan
There is a Coursera course on design from UPenn (starting Oct 22):
<https://www.coursera.org/course/design>

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zxcvvcxz
This is great. Looking forward to more advanced topics in Electrical and
Computer Engineering. To my knowledge only Coursera provides some of this,
with Computer Architecture coming up.

It would be sweet to get some serious Digital Electronics/VLSI and Integrated
Circuits courses!

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dudurocha
edX offer a course on Circuits and Eletronics.
<https://www.edx.org/courses/MITx/6.002x/2012_Fall/about> I started last
spring, but didn't finished because was a bit hard and time demanding.

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Kelliot
A question for someone in the know that see this.

Are these qualifications the sort of thing you could include in a CV?

Being only 9 months in my first IT job it looks pretty bare right now, in need
of padding.

~~~
ximeng
Yes

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kentosi
Direct link to the set of courses:
<http://www.stanford.edu/online/courses/index.html>

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shicky
How are those with full time jobs managing to find time to take part in these
courses?

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finkin1
Sweet. Signed up for Startup Boards: Advanced Entrepreneurship

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dylok4200
just as a caution, comic sans should not be used on a resume. LOL. nice
stuff.fonts sure do have a personality.

