Online Learning 2012

Online Learning Education made accessible world wide

Free online learning before…

Previous attempts of offering online courses via Academic Earth and Free Video Lectures websites  Online tutoring at Khan Academy 

◦ Limitations:    

no interactivity with the teachers or other students no possibility of self-assessment no feeling of being part of a larger community no statement of accomplishment

Free online learning nowadays… 

Fall 2011: the opening of 3 free online courses taught by Stanford professors: ◦ AI-class : Introduction to Artificial Intelligence ◦ DB-class : Database ◦ ML-class : Machine Learning

The same courses for both Stanford’s students and the people who signed up  A successful initiative with a great number of enthusiastic participants 

AI-class experience Teachers: Sebastian Thrun & Peter Norvig Structure: 10 weeks of courses covering essential AI topics way of learning: videos separated in small chunks & short quizes 8 homework assignments, out of which 6 count for score (30%) one midterm exam (30%) one final exam (40%) Upon successful completion, one received a statement of accomplishment signed by the professors.

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It was a super course! Over this time I learn so much new things! Now I am looking for any hours to implement those algorithms in real life. Roman

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The layout of the course, small queries on lectures, weekly homework, midterm and a final = extremely efficient way to learn, it is sticky. I hope more universities learn from this method, it is superior (I have 6 years of studies, up to MSc level and this is clearly the best I have seen) Anders

AI-class statistics 160,000 people registered vs. 23,000 graduates  People’s diversity ◦ students from all countries of any social, material condition ◦ age varied 11 to 80+ ◦ different backgrounds: mostly CS people, also: pupils, doctors, philologists, retired people ◦ women made up 8% of the students  Successful interaction between the students via aiqus, facebook, twitter & group formation  Successful interaction with the teachers via Google+ hangouts 

What’s next? 

Udacity (Thrun) – a future free full-degree online university  offering two courses starting this month:  CS101 (intro to CS)  CS373 (programming a robotic car)

Coursera (Koller, Ng) – offering free courses of CS, medicine, civil engineering, etc taught by professors from Stanford, Berkeley & other renown universities  MITX – paid online courses 

Udacity: CS 373 preview 

“Over the course of seven weeks, starting February 20th, you'll learn how to program all the major systems of a robotic car, by the leader of Google and Stanford's autonomous driving teams.”

Coursera: Computer Security preview 

“In this class you will learn how to design secure systems and write secure code, how to find vulnerabilities in code and how to design software systems that limit the impact of security vulnerabilities. We will focus on principles for building secure systems and give many real world examples.”

References http://academicearth.org/  http://freevideolectures.com  http://www.khanacademy.org/  http://www.udacity.com/  http://www.cs101-class.org/hub.php 