Remember when Stanford offered those university-level Computer Science courses for free? Now the professor who ran them is leaving Stanford to start a project that will offer nothing but free CS online classes.
Sebastian Thrun is leaving his post as a researcher and professor at Stanford to start Udacity, which will teach Computer Science university courses online and completely free of charge. The first two courses are CS 101: Building a Search Engine and CS 373: Programming a Robotic Car.
Thrun’s Stanford class was whittled down from 200 to 30 students, so don’t expect an easy A, but being able to get an elite education for free is pretty awesome. Especially since you don’t have to buy an iPad. [Udacity via Slashdot, Reuters via Geekosystem]
brendan
Wednesday, January 25, 2012 at 8:52 AMThis looks really cool. CS101 here I come.
alex effing
Wednesday, January 25, 2012 at 9:52 AMDoes CS = Counter Strike?
Chaitanya
Wednesday, January 25, 2012 at 10:49 AMFree Online Schools, Khan, Academy, ITunes U, Free Text Dev Resources. All this is good but will Universities accept a kid who has educated himself using these resources? The schools still need iPads and decent computers to make the effort completely successful. They are run by governments, politics and budgets.Or is it better off for a kid to take a student loan of $2,000, buy an iPad and a few digital text books and write an entrance exam to college. Einstein did in 1896 to Zurich Polytechnic.
Blake
Thursday, January 26, 2012 at 7:51 AMThe Airspace did a very comprehensive profile on Thrun and his experience with the AI class http://theairspace.net/events/robotic-mastermind/
It’s amazing how emotional and significant this is. Very disruptive.
Caomingpeter
Thursday, January 26, 2012 at 6:06 PMThough Sebastian Thrun had made professional achievements at Stanford, he had troubled himself into a number of criminal cases originated from a campus atrocity case in 2004. Many innocent people had been influenced in fighting against those crimes since then, and Thrun’s name is not clear in those cases.
Proof of real names, dates, photos along with a police case number are listed in my blog link [ http://tysurl.com/BsEnQ4 ]Wish all victims molested in those cases would walk out of influences out of them sooner or later; and also wish those cases could be clarified and have criminals who committed those anti-humanity crimes concurred eventually.
Caomingpeter
Thursday, January 26, 2012 at 6:07 PMThough Sebastian Thrun had made professional achievements at Stanford, he had troubled himself into a number of criminal cases originated from a campus atrocity case in 2004. Many innocent people had been influenced in fighting against those crimes since then, and Thrun’s name is not clear in those cases.
Wish all victims molested in those cases would walk out of influences out of them sooner or later; and also wish those cases could be clarified and have criminals who committed those anti-humanity crimes concurred eventually.