Stanford University is offering the online world more of its undergraduate level courses. These free courses consist of You Tube videos with computer-marked quizzes and programming assignments.
I-Programmer ran a news story in August about Stanford's free online classes in artificial intelligence, machine learning and database which seem to be setting a trend.
The ball had been started rolling by Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig's free online version of their Stanford AI class, for which they hoped to reach an audience in the order of a hundred thousand, a target which they seem to have achieved.
Then two more courses were announced for the Fall 2011 Semester and now we have news of another batch of courses that will follow the same model for the forthcoming Spring Semester, starting in January or February 2012.
The model is that courses are delivered as lecture videos, which are broken into small chunks some of which will contain integrated quiz questions. There will be approximately two hours worth of video content per week over 10 weeks.
There are no textbooks to buy, although there may be some recommended reading; and no tuition, although there will be forums for asking questions and receiving feedback and answers.
Among the courses on offer is Professor Andrew Ng's Machine Learning, which is currently being delivered in this way to tens of thousands of online students - so if you missed its initial interactive presentation there's another chance to join in.
A further eight Computer Science topics are on offer. You can meet the professors who will be teaching the courses in the following videos and follow the links to find out about the prerequisites for each course and to sign up for them.
Currently we have some unanswered questions - in particular will there be an advanced track with exams and a certificate for completion of the course as there is for the current three courses, including the AI Class, for which we've just written up our impressions, as students, to date.
We'll let you know the answer to this once we have more information.
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