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OpenClassroom: Free video courses from Stanford University

openclassroom.stanford.edu

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Re: OpenClassroom: Free video courses from Stanford University

#5

Post by sidconn »

Hitchhiker wrote: post #3
sidconn wrote: post #2

Any idea if the database videos can be downloaded, just like the computer science lectures

yes , they can be. There is a tab on the upper right corner if you are signed on for the course.

thanks mate! I will try it out

Re: OpenClassroom: Free video courses from Stanford University

#7

Post by brackin »

This is incredible, all of this makes me think higher of Stanford as an institution. The fact they're both giving all of this away for free and that they're putting so much of it up. I was impressed after the first two but now they're adding more and making finding the courses more structured.

Khanacademy showed alternative education methods, Stanford didn't try and discredit services like this, instead they put many of their courses online too. I'll be going through these courses later.

Re: OpenClassroom: Free video courses from Stanford University

#8

Post by iqster »

ashamedlion wrote: post #4

I really respect Stanford's willingness to share content for free. They seem to have let go of the elitist notion of the past wherein content is worth so much to universities. This feels like they actually want people to learn.

Bump. In the past, I've been through Stanford's IOS dev course and ML course (via iTunes). Currently, I'm doing the AI course. It is truly amazing that Stanford is giving away this content for free.

As an academic, it makes me wondering how education will change over the next 10 years. If a prof gives a fantastic lecture in the Fall of 2010, does he need to repeat himself in 2011? I had the experience of lecturing an undergrad course in Programming Languages many years ago. Honestly, the content didn't change much (I was teaching Scheme, ML and Prolog). I did get a bit better answering and anticipating student questions. I'll admit that in some cases, content must be updated fairly frequently. For instance, Prof. Ousterhaut's web app course on the site seems to be covering Rails 2.x.x. Teaching it today, perhaps 3.x or 3.1 would be used.

However, when I look at how well the community can improve the quality of a lecture, it blows my mind. In the Stanford AI class, for instance, the lecturer made a slight error where he defined the admissibility criteria of the h function (estimated cost) in A* search as less than the true cost rather than less than or equal to the true cost. Well ... this was quickly spotted by students and a correction was promptly issued. This blows my mind!

This also has the potential of making things worse on the supply side of education. In the last decade, it has undoubtedly gotten harder to get a faculty position in Computer Science. Will the advent of online education make that situation worse? As someone who has been an educator in the past, my personal opinion is that education should be available for free. But, I worry that it might not be sustainable.

Re: OpenClassroom: Free video courses from Stanford University

#10

Post by nkassis »

After the first week of the AI and Machine Language class I'm truly impressed. I feel I'll be putting more effort into this than most of my classes in college simply due to the metrics and ease of UI for the in video question. Now they should add achievements like for the ML class, "3 perfect first attempt"... or stuff like that ;p

Also anyone knows of a good online video lecture on Computer graphics? Something with some accompanying material?

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