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Stanford Offers 13 classes, including AI, for free

see.stanford.edu

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Re: Stanford Offers 13 classes, including AI, for free

#33

Post by shad0wfax »

steve_b wrote: post #17
thebandrews wrote: post #10

As universities offer more and more curriculum online, would you hire someone who had self taught himself through a CS degree? Or would you want to see the diploma?

I have a huge bias towards self-learning. Most people I know get a degree/diploma to get a job. The people who self-teach are doing it more because they're curious cats. I'll take the curious cat.

The problem is the start. Self taught folks usually find it hard to break into the mainstream, unless they have already done stuff on their own (startup) or are known in the open source community. The CS degree guarantees a channel to enter a company. I was reading a related article from Prof. Vivek Wadhwa about this (his take on students dropping out to do startups), and he encourages going to school (any school). Though, there is some truth I think in school providing a bigger picture/research that is hard to for some self taught folks to get to.

Re: Stanford Offers 13 classes, including AI, for free

#35

Post by EvanKelly »

thisuser wrote: post #14
nirvana wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Machine Learning, and Databases classes are like the AI class on the new system, with quizzes and a statement from the professor about how you did at the end. At least the intro videos for the ML class stated as such and I got that impression from the database class as well.

Am I the only one yearning for the convex optimization I & II classes to be offered in the new style?

I would love to take a second shot at a convex optimization course. I took one from a former PhD student of Boyd's during my junior year of college and I was not at the right point in my education for a class like that.

It touched on some really great real world optimization problems, including an interesting couple of lectures on the Netflix prize.

Re: Stanford Offers 13 classes, including AI, for free

#36

Post by mindcrime »

thebandrews wrote: post #10

As universities offer more and more curriculum online, would you hire someone who had self taught himself through a CS degree? Or would you want to see the diploma?

Given that my own background[1] is a weird mishmash of formal education at various levels, and auto-didactic learning, I would be totally down with hiring somebody without requiring that they have a particular degree. As long as they can convince me that they have the required knowledge / skills, I really don't care if they're self-taught, university educated, learned through an apprenticeship, learned at a community college, or some hybrid of all of the above. I'm only interested in the end result.

[1]: For what it's worth, I was a junior when I dropped out of my bachelor's degree in CS program, but over the years I've accumulated 3 associate degrees: General Education, Computer Programming, and High Performance Computing, and have studied all sorts of stuff on my own time... just because it's what I found interesting. And I still work on learning new stuff each and every day.

Re: Stanford Offers 13 classes, including AI, for free

#39

Post by __rkaup__ »

nirvana wrote: post #13
thebandrews wrote: post #10

As universities offer more and more curriculum online, would you hire someone who had self taught himself through a CS degree? Or would you want to see the diploma?

I've found little correlation between diplomas and effectiveness as a programmer in my hiring. So, that includes people who are self taught. I may be in the minority, and I think that people who have diplomas sometimes have the opinion that anyone who didn't go thru the pain they went thru is missing something.

Interesting. I wonder how much that skews hiring, including in other fields.
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