

Stanford is offering some of its most popular engineering classes for free - tortilla
http://see.stanford.edu/

======
gregfjohnson
I'm a bit of a lurker on HN, but had to add a comment here. The Stanford
online offerings are fantastic. I'm taking Stephen Boyd's "Introduction to
Linear Dynamic Systems", and it is simply superb. The course is given at a
rate of two lectures per week, but I've found that it fits into the rest of my
life more conveniently to watch and absorb one lecture per week. Monday
evenings are now my official "learn some new and important stuff" nights.

"Linear dynamic systems" is the essential intellectual foundation of a scary
number of different areas: control systems, modern financial modeling,
statistical modeling and analysis, search, etc. The material is a bit
difficult, but it's one of those areas that are widely applicable.

I firmly believe that this whole area should be part of the core curriculum of
any computer science program. It is right where more and more of the
discipline is heading.

I've wanted to learn this stuff for a while, and have banged my head against a
few books in the area, tried to take a UCLA extension course, etc. But never
have I encountered more clear, intuitive, and lucid explanations of this
material than in Prof. Boyd's online lectures.

This is one of those resources that make you wonder, "Why would an
organization like Stanford but this on the web and give it away for free??"
But if they are going to do it, then smart people sure as hell should take
advantage of it.

~~~
dmv
"Why would an organization like Stanford [put] this on the web and give it
away for free??"

The question is better put as to why should they not. Stanford is a non-profit
institute devoted to education, the advancement of science, etc. At this time
in history, one of the most cost-effective / high-impact means to fulfill
their objectives is to produce this material on the web.

The objective of a school like Stanford should not be to keep this material
exclusive. There is no risk of going out of business -- the college experience
plays too important a role for too many people. And there are tangible
benefits to 'being there'; the networking plus the diploma can be helpful. A
school like Stanford, or MIT already has to turn away way too many completely
qualified and gifted applicants. Stanford can not effectively scale to address
increased demand for the full experience. If it can help those it turned away
to still learn, great.

It is also important marketing on both a short and long term scale. On an
immediate basis, a potential candidate now has an opportunity to look inside
to see whether college, and Stanford, is right for them. If they don't
consider the lectures worthwhile, it is better to know that now. On a longer
time scale, this bolsters the reputation of Stanford by showing their
excellence of education. The meme occasionally circulates that some of the
Ivies (and their technical equivalents) are soft, coasting on wealth and their
laurels. As a Carnegie Mellon graduate, I can now see how Berkeley, MIT, or
Stanford's coursework measures up. [I am ashamed that my own alma mater
continues to retreat in the other direction, and worry that this will be a
long-term competitive disadvantage.]

Likewise, as you describe, many may be convinced that a lower tier school is
as comprehensive as the top tier. When we see these schools provide their
lectures, a more fair comparison could be made prior to making a commitment.

~~~
gleb
Actually, in terms of remote classes, Stanford is in a very special situation.
Stanford has been providing distance learning in engineering for 30+ years,
primarily to local high-tech companies. Delivery was done through dedicated TV
circuits (most client companies are local), VCR tapes and started switching to
Internet in 1999. That means that the classes, the facilities, and all the
associated processes are fully optimized for remote delivery. Curious side
benefit for full time students in CS is that you really don't need to go to
class, and can just watch it on TV/Internet.

This used to be called SITN (Stanford Instructional Television Network), and
is apparently called SCPD ( <http://scpd.stanford.edu> ) now. Check out the
offered courses. They cover full BS & MS+ in Computer Science and many other
engineering fields.

Many large companies in SV are members, and offer mostly free access to
Stanford courses to the employees. It's a nice perk and an advantage when
recruiting. It's also a significant source of revenue for Stanford, something
they will think twice about giving away. It's a standard problem of a market
leader having to cannibalize it's own market. So, it's great if somewhat
surprising to see Stanford starting out in this direction.

------
viae
This weekend I began to take a computer science course at the local community
college.

After the four hour class, in which the professor spent the first two hours
talking about how accelerated the class was, and the 2nd two hours on how to
install the JAVA SDK on Windows I immediately dropped the class.

My decision was based on my personal findings that MIT, Berkeley, and
Stanford's online offerings are superior even though I won't be able to
interact with a mentor.

While I'm happy that I'll be getting my $500 back (I think I'll put that money
towards a cyclocross bike or Thule roof rack :cp), I'm appalled by the lack of
accessibility to good mentorship at the community college level. Is my
experience peculiar or is this pervasive?

As an aside, the prof. also called the Windows CMD, Unix... not even "like"
Unix. He said, "This is Unix." My head almost exploded. This was after he
spent a good deal of time telling people there were lots of jobs in the Unix
and Line-UX field...

~~~
jackchristopher
Community colleges were designed to quickly train people for the post-war
(WWII) economy. And since bureaucrats run them, you learn the industry
demands...from yesterday.

The students and teachers are there for "a better job"; No enthusiasm. And
like _any_ situation where people do things they don't want to, it sucks.

And I think _that_ is the real value of top universities, Y Combinator, or any
great place. You get to do cool work with people who care about the same
things you do. Find a way to emulate _that_.

And I'm not trying to be negative about community college, or college in
general. But if you do choose to go back; Use college, don't let it use you.
And that's true for life in general as well.

But ambitious people find a way; I'm self-taught. And while that would be
scary to many people. Doing _anything_ new is. And I feel alive.

~~~
gregwebs
I don't think you should be bashing things you don't know much about. It is
one thing to point out that the quality of instruction and general level of
interest of students is lower than at Universities. It is another to paint
broad inaccurate strokes, pretend to understand their mission and label the
people that run them as bureaucrats. There are many administrators, teachers,
and students at community colleges that are interested and passionate about
what they do.

~~~
silencio
THANK you. I went to a CC because I dropped out of high school a couple years
early with my GED (would have gone completely nuts if I didn't), and there was
no way I would get accepted to the top tier universities I wanted to go to in
that way. I've also taken classes at both 2 and 4 year universities throughout
my middle/high school years.

All I can say is that there are some awful teachers like the one above saying
DOS is Unix and such complete nonsense, but I've also come across some of the
most amazing teachers that even my now-in-4-year-universities friends from
high school wish they had for some of the classes we share. Yes, the level of
education is not the same, but for the general classes, it's not so different,
and sometimes can be a unique and nice experience. Plus, you can transfer, and
those classes can count towards your degree. Not everyone is in a CC to get a
better job, a lot of people end up transferring to such "top" universities
like UCLA, UC Berkeley, Stanford, USC and the like (is it obvious I live in
California? :) )

Lastly, none of this is stopping me from supplementing my education on my own.
There are some topics that are rarely taught in many places (like, say,
Mac/iPhone programming) I'm interested in. I would hope that's the case with
anyone and everyone, not just people involved in top universities and Y
Combinator :p

------
benbeltran
This whole open courseware trend is awesome. My university is doing a project
to open its courses too, but focused more on helping south-american
universities (I'm from Mexico, so yeah, spanish).

------
ilamont
The Harvard Extension School has a bunch of CS offerings available through the
iTunes store, for free:

<http://itunes.extension.harvard.edu/>

It's also possible to take CS distance ed classes for credit via the Extension
School website. I haven't taken any, but one student there says some of the
undergraduate offerings have the same curricula as their Harvard College
counterparts:

[http://www.cluehq.com/blog/2008/10/14/formal-systems-and-
com...](http://www.cluehq.com/blog/2008/10/14/formal-systems-and-computation-
is-kicking-my-ass/)

Note the for-credit offerings are not free.

------
wensing
Perhaps my son's CS education won't cost $400,000/yr after all (he's 8 mos
old).

Yes, of _course_ he'll be interested in programming.

~~~
Create
Don't worry: it will not cost $400,000/yr.
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UF8uR6Z6KLc>

------
myelin
I've been working through the CS229 (Machine Learning) notes - just the
handouts, for now - and am finding them pretty uesful. There's a lot of good
stuff in there that I didn't learn in Electrical Engineering at college.

------
dbr
Check out:

<http://www.ocwconsortium.org/use/use-dynamic.html>

My Favorites:

<http://webcast.berkeley.edu/courses.php>

<http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/home/home/index.htm>

~~~
mhidalgo
While these sites offer more variety, the current limited stanford offering
has better quality. By quality I mean you get all the lecture videos , course
notes, exams, and hw solutions. If you compare this to the relevant classes at
MIT and Berkeley its just plain better. At MIT you have no video for their
intro CS classes and you don't have access to all the lecture notes and
Berkeley is just video. Kudos to Stanford , this has been a great resource to
me.

------
code_devil
I actually liked the classes by MIT and Berkley. They atleast have more
variety for foundation level CS classes.

------
varenc
MIT's OCW has a whole lot more! No social networking aspect though.

<http://ocw.mit.edu>

------
sown
But, alas, you get no credit...

------
swombat
Silverlight?? WTF!

Did they get bought off by Microsoft?

~~~
jm4
They have multiple methods for accessing the videos, one of which is
Silverlight. Two of the other methods work on Windows and Mac and at least one
of them works on Linux. I don't know what you're complaining about.

Believe it or not, there are some people out there actually using Silverlight.
Even more people use other Microsoft products by choice. Microsoft couldn't
have possibly "bought off" all of them so just chill out.

I'm not much of a Microsoft fan myself, but a little competition for Adobe in
the online video/rich interface arena can only be a good thing.

~~~
Create
MS has always, and is still actively _buying off_ educational and govt
institutions: the nature of centralized corruption makes this possible. Not to
speak of the preinstalled OS-es from vendors - for a casual end-user, there is
almost no other choice (OK, apples at substantially higher price). Therefore,
it is in the most rarest case, that MS (and silverlight) a conscious choice
for most people: it is there "by default" both content provider and client
side, and changing anything about this is highly non trivial (even for
"technical" people: think W3C and HTML/ES etc.).

<http://www.theserverside.com/news/thread.tss?thread_id=49451>

[http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD12xx/EW...](http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD12xx/EWD1283.html)

How "they" try to corrupt "us"

At my former university it was a firm principle of the informatics group that
we would not teach our students how to use industrial products. The main
reasons at the time were the quality of industrial products was never up to
academic standards, and the market being as fickle as it is, the industrial
product was of volatile significance only.

Later I learned how much the purposes of the University and those of industry
can diverge. Universities, believe it or not, are interested in education, but
I learned of industries that were not interested in education at all, neither
in an educated work force, nor in an educated customer base. On the contrary,
they preferred a docile, brainwashed work force and undemanding customers
hooked on their products.

Another remark is that it is the task of a "leading University" to lead. In
particular this means for us that we should give society not what it asks for,
but what it needs. This issue is particularly acute for CS because their
society asks for snake oil, for more of the same, though we all know that it
hardly works.

The above was triggered by a letter we received from one of our colleagues. I
quote from it - "MS" presumably stands for "Microsoft"- :

"We had a good meeting with MS representatives [...]. They were open to the
possibility of giving us a _significant_ number of graduate fellowships [...].
A key thing that MS wants in return is that our students have experience in
programming in NT environments; they and other companies want such students.
[...]"

Well, that was a revealing meeting! For the record I quote from the following
paragraph of that letter:

"I believe a key to the MS support for our department will be clear evidence
that we are using NT (or related software, e.g. CE). I need to collect
information about your use of NT (or intended use of MS software) as part of
our proposal."

Since I do not want MS to sue me, I won't tell you how much I appreciate their
offer. You must guess. For more detail I refer to the communications of the
Chairman of the Board of "Mathematics Inc.", as published in [0]. For
dominance of the Universities, see EWD539 in particular.

[0] "Selected Writings on Computing: A Personal Perspective" by Edsger
W.Dijkstra. Texts and Monographs in Computer Science, Springer-Verlag 1982
[ISBN: 0-387-90652-5]

Austin, 21 February 1999

prof. dr Edsger W. Dijkstra Department of Computer Sciences The University of
Texas at Austin Austin, TX 78712-1188 USA

~~~
jm4
Of course they cut deals with educational and government institutions. It's
just good business to do so. Expose the students to your products and there's
a good chance they will buy them later because they already know them.
Besides, they can write these deals off as donations and benefit from the good
PR. Numerous companies operate like this. Schools, especially, have
traditionally been Apple's territory. Do you really think cash-strapped
schools are paying retail for those Macs? Microsoft is not alone here and
despite the fact that we can cite cases of corruption the practice itself is
not necessarily corrupt. It is merely a marketing tactic of early exposure and
high profile usage. The result is genuine interest among paying customers.

The type of work that I do exposes me to many types of web technologies at
many different organizations. This is purely anecdotal, but there is real
interest in Silverlight among heavy users of Microsoft technologies. Adoption
is very low right now, but there are quite a few shops testing the waters. And
why not? If you don't care about multi-platform interoperability it's actually
pretty nice. If I had to guess I'd say there are more shops like that out
there than ones who develop platform-independent applications. I think this is
a very bad idea, but these organizations are making a conscious decision to
operate like this. They could just as easily choose to use platform-
independent and open source tools, but they're not doing it. Microsoft isn't
paying them all.

~~~
Create
_And why not?_

Because of software patents.

 _Microsoft isn't paying them all._

No, it is threatening them all if they don't pay. In the name of "innovation".

~~~
jm4
_Because of software patents._

Did you completely miss the point I was trying to make? You and I may not like
Microsoft products because of their proprietary nature, but there are plenty
of customers making a conscious decision to use them despite this. In fact,
quite a few of them probably choose Microsoft specifically because of this.

 _No, it is threatening them all if they don't pay. In the name of
"innovation"._

I don't even know where to start here. I'm going to completely overlook that
"innovation" remark because your poor use of the English language makes it
impossible for me to figure out what you're trying to say.

Do you realize that you've contradicted yourself here? First, you cite
examples of Microsoft paying people off to use their software. Now they are
threatening them if they don't pay? Which one is it?

If what you're getting at is all that BSA nonsense I'll bite on that. The
companies that get bullied by Microsoft and the BSA have chosen to use
Microsoft software. Many of them are using it illegally. Either way, that's
something they have opened themselves up to by using Microsoft software. Do I
think it sucks? Absolutely. That's why I choose my software carefully.
Microsoft is not like the Mafia showing up at your door demanding money as
soon as you set up shop. They are demanding money - whether right or wrong -
from people already using their software.

Ten years ago your arguments would have held a lot more water. I may have even
made those arguments myself. But things have changed considerably over the
last several years. We have real alternatives to Microsoft software. In many
cases we have acceptable interoperability between Microsoft products and their
open source equivalents. The fact is you can get by in a mostly Windows world
without ever touching a Microsoft product so I tend to think the primary cause
of complaints like these is the stupidity of the people who still use software
that doesn't fulfill their needs.

