Stanford Places Engineering Courses Online
Adding to an ever growing list of free online courseware is Stanford University's "Stanford Engineering Everywhere."
Stanford is offering some of its most popular engineering classes free of charge to students and educators around the world, according to the university.
"Stanford Engineering Everywhere (SEE) expands the Stanford experience to students and educators online," Stanford said in a statemrnt. "A computer and an Internet connection is all you need. View lecture videos, access reading lists and other course handouts, take quizzes and tests, and communicate with other SEE students, all at your convenience."
Like a late night infomercial, however, there is some fine print: "SEE courses cannot be taken for credit and do not include access to Stanford-restricted computers, libraries, or services. Content may not include all the material used in the campus offering and cannot be used for commercial purposes."
In other words, this is education for education's sake, not education for a degree's sake. You will not be allowed to walk-on for football tryouts.
Here's the starting lineup, sure to be expanded if/when SEE is a hit:
Programming Methodology CS106A
Programming Abstractions CS106B
Programming Paradigms CS107
Introduction to Robotics CS223A
Natural Language Processing CS224N
Machine Learning CS229
The Fourier Transform and its Applications EE261
Introduction to Linear Dynamical Systems EE263
Convex Optimization I EE364A
Convex Optimization II EE364B
On top of making the courses available to students, Stanford is making these courses available to educators to modify and reuse through the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License. That means a little Stanford engineering goodness is about to spread itself around-the-world.
Oh, and if you're wondering whether Stanford's educational skills have ever produced anything worthwhile, you could Google it.
Originally posted on AppScout.