I took two of the classes and they never once claimed that either of these classes were the same as the Stanford class. In fact, they stated several times that

I took two of the classes and they never once claimed that either of these classes were the same as the Stanford class. In fact, they stated several times that they were not the same, and made it quite clear that you would not be getting Stanford credit of any kind for the class. For the database class, I did receive a "letter of achievement" or somesuch from the professor, but it was a letter from the professor and not from Stanford. For the Machine Learning class, I didn't even get that. In the database class they did say that this class wasn't terribly different from the real Stanford class, but that the Stanford students would probably be assigned a bit more of the problems that were particularly challenging. Those questions, however, were pretty much the least valuable questions in the entire class, since they had little relationship to any kind of query you'd ever use in the real world. I.e., they're the kind of question that teachers like to put in there so that you can have a more distinct grading curve. In any case, the database class was a fair amount of work, so I don't think that it is likely to make a Stanford education seem too easy. The Machine Learning class, on the other hand, never made any claim at all of being remotely like the real Stanford class. Their only claim was that it would give you a good foundation to use Machine Learning techniques in the real world. That is a completely true statement. As it turns out, however, Stanford did offer the free Machine Learning class that I took as a real Stanford class for those at Stanford who wanted an easier version of Machine Learning.