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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

#43
post #40

how to watch this without itunes? and what is this itunes thing, by the way?

iTunes has iTunes University where a lot of educational videos can be found. If I'm not mistaken you can find the same videos on YouTube at Stanford's YouTube channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/StanfordUniversity

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

#44
post #40

how to watch this without itunes? and what is this itunes thing, by the way?

iTunes has iTunes University where a lot of educational videos can be found. If I'm not mistaken you can find the same videos on YouTube at Stanford's YouTube channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/StanfordUniversity

You can also view them on this site: http://www.cosmolearning.com/ in the computer science department.

I've found this site to be really helpful. Many of the universities' lectures that are available online have been submitted here. makes much easier to find them.And I occasionally run into some pretty interesting documentaries and stuff. ;)

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

#45
post #13

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.

I'm an old dog so there were no CS classes at my middle school when I started programming. Naturally I have a bias towards those who took matters into their own hands and are self-taught.

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

#49

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 am more inclined, as a rule, to hire self-taught programmers who have built something interesting over programmers with flashy degrees and little experience to back it up.

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

#50
post #17

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.

I self-taught myself programming for a while, discovered I liked it, and decided to go back to school in CS so that I could learn even more about it. (The first time through school, I was interested in different things and ended up with a philosophy degree.) While some of people I encountered in the CS department were there to line up a job, school can just be an efficient, focused learning method for the curious.

In general, one nice thing about hiring CS students as opposed to purely self-taught programmers is that, in my experience, they're more likely to have a good understanding algorithms and data structures. Self-taught coders often only learn as much as they think they need to know about the topic to complete the task in front of them. (Obviously, for those interested, it's as straightforward to teach yourself analysis of algorithms as any other topic.) For some types of programming positions, having a rigorous background in this area is crucial, though in others not so much.

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