(2011-08-10) Stanford Ai Course Online Free

Stanford University is offering its AI course online for free!

Update: more than 58k students have registered already!

Jan24'2012 update: there were ultimately 160k students! And I loved as well his story of the physical class at Stanford, which dwindled from 200 students to 30 students because the online course was more intimate and better at teaching than the real-world course on which it was based. Sebastian Thrun, one of the creators of that course, concluded that “I can’t teach at Stanford again.” He’s given up his tenure at Stanford, and he’s started a new online university called Udacity. He wants to enroll 500,000 students for his first course, on how to build a Search Engine — and of course it’s all going to be free.

Jan29 update by Charlotte Allen: What made last fall's Thrun-Norvig course different--and revolutionary--was its certification (Credential) component. The two instructors were effectively warranting independently of Stanford that the online students who passed the course had learned as much about artificial intelligence and had been held to the same standards as the Stanford students who took the bricks-and-mortar version. Indeed, Stanford refused to have any official connection to the Thrun-Norvig course (in contrast to the other two online courses, which involved no professorial certification). Thrun and Norvig used a non-Stanford server to host their website (although it did display the Stanford engineering school seal), and posted teaching videos made outside of their Stanford classroom... According to Chronicle reporter Jeffrey Young, hundreds of education providers traditional and non-traditional hope to partake in a $2 million grant partly sponsored by the Mac Arthur Foundation that would fund experiments with online Badge certification. Young wrote: "Employers might prefer a world of badges to the current system. After all, traditional college diplomas look elegant when hung on the wall, but they contain very little detail about what the recipient learned."