On the Nature of Things | Forum

Researcher and professor Sebastian Thrun turned a lot of heads when he headed a bold experiment in online teaching at Stanford University by offering an artificial intelligence course for free. Of the 160,000 enrollees, 23,000 graduated the course with a Stanford University certificate and a head full of computer science knowledge. The experience of teaching a course on such a massive scale apparently left its mark on Thrun as well, who announced today at the Digital Life Design conference that he was leaving Stanford and was heading up a new free education project called Udacity.

Like the Stanford course, Udacity will be focused on computer science courses taught at the university level and free of charge. There are currently two courses available. The first, CS 101: Building a Search Engine, will require no previous knowledge of programming and aims to teach the fundamentals of computer science in seven weeks. It will be taught by Thrun and University of Virginia professor Dave Evans. The second course is a follow up to the Stanford AI course called CS 373: Programming a Robotic Car, and will certainly touch on Thrun’s passion of driverless vehicles.

Demon of Undoing wrote:Here's one to start.

Sebastian Thrun, Mastermind of Stanford’s Free AI Course, Forms Free Education Website

Researcher and professor Sebastian Thrun turned a lot of heads when he headed a bold experiment in online teaching at Stanford University by offering an artificial intelligence course for free. Of the 160,000 enrollees, 23,000 graduated the course with a Stanford University certificate and a head full of computer science knowledge. The experience of teaching a course on such a massive scale apparently left its mark on Thrun as well, who announced today at the Digital Life Design conference that he was leaving Stanford and was heading up a new free education project called Udacity.

Like the Stanford course, Udacity will be focused on computer science courses taught at the university level and free of charge. There are currently two courses available. The first, CS 101: Building a Search Engine, will require no previous knowledge of programming and aims to teach the fundamentals of computer science in seven weeks. It will be taught by Thrun and University of Virginia professor Dave Evans. The second course is a follow up to the Stanford AI course called CS 373: Programming a Robotic Car, and will certainly touch on Thrun’s passion of driverless vehicles.

Damn schools, damn public education and damn your priestly protection of knowledge, Sirs!!!

Enki wrote:Well...we're starting to run into the problem with intellectual property. Intellectual property is a protection for the priesthood. They don't want knowledge to be free, they want it to be governed by property rights. They want to OWN your thoughts.