By Steve Kolowich, Inside Higher Ed
Stanford the latest of a handful of elite American universities to pull back the curtain on their vaunted courses, joining the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s OpenCourseWare project, Yale University’s Open Yale Courses and the University of California at Berkeley’s Webcast.Berkeley, among others. The university’s computer science department is planning to broadcast eight additional courses for free in the spring, most focusing on high-level concepts that require participants already to have a pretty good command of math and science. Norvig and Thrun’s A.I. course, for example, assumes knowledge of linear algebra and probability theory. Next semester’s open courses will include Cryptography, Human Computer Interaction and Probabilistic Graphic Models. Norvig and Thrun are not the first college professors to experiment with what are known as “massive open online courses,” or MOOCs. Others have been broadcasting their courses to the Web-enabled masses for years.
Share on Facebook