| Summary: Stanford online courses are finally a reality. Stanford is becoming another leading university opening up their coursework material to a wider audience, for free. |
Stanford online courses are finally a reality. Stanford is becoming another leading university opening up their coursework material to a wider audience, for free. Stanford online classes will now be available to anyone with a computer and an internet connection. Computer science professor Sebastian Thrun, most recently known for unveiling his Udacity project, where students can take a 7-week course allowing them to learn how to build their own search engine, decided along with a handful of other Stanford colleagues that their courses should be available to anyone who wants to take them.
This program would allow anyone with Internet access to attend classes online, interact with the instructors and take quizzes. They will even receive a grade for their work, all for free. And with one email to a group of other professionals announcing the new initiative, Thrun and his colleagues found themselves with over 5,000 students enrolled within a few hours. By the next day they had 10,000 students enrolled. These numbers would hardly seem surprising, considering that Thrun’s colleague Andrew Ng also taught a free online class in machine learning which had 100,000 students enrolled and Thrun’s other online class on artificial intelligence saw a 160,000 person enrollment.
While there are no certificates or degrees at the end of the completed courses, students will receive a letter of accomplishment from the professors. They will not, however, mention the university by name. Still, that did not stop all of the students in almost 200 different countries from taking, and completing the courses. Thrun takes it as a sign that he is headed in the right direction with this idea, and aims to bring free, high quality education to the masses so that they will be empowered to find better jobs.
Whether you are looking to discover a new career in computer science, or enhance what you already know, you can’t go wrong with a free online course taught by the best that the computer science field has to offer. For more information, go here.
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