Last fall Stanford Professor Sebastian Thrun offered his CS221 course ‘Introduction to Artificial Intelligence’ online, for free.
http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2012/01/23/udacity-and-the-future-of-online-universities/
Thrun told the story of his Introduction to Artificial Intelligence class, which ran from October to December last year. It started as a way of putting his Stanford course online — he was going to teach the whole thing, for free, to anybody in the world who wanted it. With quizzes and grades and a final certificate, in parallel with the in-person course he was giving his Stanford undergrad students. He sent out one email to announce the class, and from that one email there was ultimately an enrollment of 160,000 students. Thrun scrambled to put together a website which could scale and support that enrollment, and succeeded spectacularly well.
Just a couple of datapoints from Thrun’s talk: there were more students in his course from Lithuania alone than there are students at Stanford altogether. There were students in Afghanistan, exfiltrating war zones to grab an hour of connectivity to finish the homework assignments. There were single mothers keeping the faith and staying with the course even as their families were being hit by tragedy. And when it finished, thousands of students around the world were educated and inspired. Some 248 of them, in total, got a perfect score: they never got a single question wrong, over the entire course of the class. All 248 took the course online; not one was enrolled at Stanford.
Yesterday at the DLD (Digital Life,Design), Conference in Munich, Germany, Thrun made an announcement regarding online education.
he 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.
Its not exactly an accredited university, but it is free. You can enroll now for his next course which starts February 20th:
CS 101: BUILDING A SEARCH ENGINE
Learn programming in seven weeks. We’ll teach you enough about computer science that you can build a web search engine like Google or Yahoo!
Great story, Sam!
Coincidentally, the New Media department at the University of Maine has been planning to make our lessons more accessible, by adapting some of our courses to a just-in-time knowledge model and putting it all online for free. We’ve been talking about implementing a recommendation interface like The Pool as well.
More about that in the future NMDnet post!