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It's interesting to see the school simultaneously make a big push for free educational content online while also expanding it's for-profit online reach.

• geogra4 15y ago
  There's almost no competition between the two. Mainly because you can't really put free courses on a resume. The education is free but the credentials aren't?
  • drcode 15y ago
    Actually, you get a free certificate at the end of ai-class.com.
    • joshz 15y ago
      Not only that but prof. Ng (ml class) actually suggests putting it on a resume.
    • sown 15y ago
      Even if Professor Ng says to put it on your resume, it remains to be seen if employers will accept it as any sort of credential.
      • ramblerman 15y ago
        Some will and some won't. Seems pretty self evident...
• rch 15y ago
  Online education isn't any more free to provide than anything else. And not all courses will scale equally well either. For instance, would a data mining course include several thousand cpu hours per student? One would hope they are working towards a sustainable model for efficiently allocating education services, and doing so will require reasonable fees for some courses.
  • eob 15y ago
    Yes, you're right. I'm not criticizing their decision. With the cost of a college education skyrocketing, and "open source" education in its infancy, the moves and adaptations of the big players are just interesting to watch, is all I meant. I believe the next 10 years will birth new forms of socially-acceptable higher education, which is a pretty big deal, since the system we have to day is pretty ancient. MIT, with it's strict "information should be free" policy. Stanford, with a mixed bag approach. Harvard, with it's extension school. Johns Hopkins, with it's satellite campuses in other countries.. The big schools are all trying out different strategies to offer a variety of bundles for students looking for education.
  • softwaregravy 15y ago
    Actually, I don't see this as out of line or inconsistent at all. Providing free education classes, particularly the introduction levels, increases awareness, acclimatizes students to learning online, and they learn how to do it. (They being Stanford. They work out hiccups over servers, videos, tests, whatever in the free courses.) If Stanford then offered the next level of AI class online, but charged $1K? $3K for it, they'd get all their money back. Could turn into a classic Freemium model. On the upside, this would probably be better for students as a whole, because most of them have no idea what they're really interested in. The ability to take all the intro classes for free and then pay for the ones that are more interesting to them is pretty interesting, from a macro-societal point of view.
• sown 15y ago
  One thing to consider is that large organizations often time have business units work against each other just as a sort of accident or unclear goals.
• davidtgoldblatt 15y ago
  The reason for this is that the parts of "Stanford" (an organization comprising tens of thousands of people) involved in each push are basically unrelated. The paid-certificate program is run by the Stanford Center for Professional Development ("SCPD"), and is a trimmed down version of the online masters program. Costs here are high because courses are usually paid for by an employer investing in employee training; the SCPD program (like masters programs in general) is a profit center. The db-class, ml-class, ai-class websites (and their video-only equivalents through openclassroom and classx) are being run by the professors who teach the classes, and the goal is education. There isn't a "Stanford" policy on how online instruction should operate; just different members of a single club working independently.