5 ms·

Stanford is offering some of its most popular engineering classes for free

99 points by tortilla 18y ago

code_devil 18y ago
I actually liked the classes by MIT and Berkley. They atleast have more variety for foundation level CS classes.
wensing 18y ago
Perhaps my son's CS education won't cost $400,000/yr after all (he's 8 mos old). Yes, of course he'll be interested in programming.
- Create 18y ago
  Don't worry: it will not cost $400,000/yr. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UF8uR6Z6KLc http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UF8uR6Z6KLc
myelin 18y ago
I've been working through the CS229 (Machine Learning) notes - just the handouts, for now - and am finding them pretty uesful. There's a lot of good stuff in there that I didn't learn in Electrical Engineering at college.
benbeltran 18y ago
This whole open courseware trend is awesome. My university is doing a project to open its courses too, but focused more on helping south-american universities (I'm from Mexico, so yeah, spanish).
dbr 18y ago
Check out: http://www.ocwconsortium.org/use/use-dynamic.html http://www.ocwconsortium.org/use/use-dynamic.html My Favorites: http://webcast.berkeley.edu/courses.php http://webcast.berkeley.edu/courses.php http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/home/home/index.htm http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/home/home/index.htm
- mhidalgo 18y ago
  While these sites offer more variety, the current limited stanford offering has better quality. By quality I mean you get all the lecture videos , course notes, exams, and hw solutions. If you compare this to the relevant classes at MIT and Berkeley its just plain better. At MIT you have no video for their intro CS classes and you don't have access to all the lecture notes and Berkeley is just video. Kudos to Stanford , this has been a great resource to me.
swombat 18y ago
Silverlight?? WTF! Did they get bought off by Microsoft?
- jm4 18y ago
  They have multiple methods for accessing the videos, one of which is Silverlight. Two of the other methods work on Windows and Mac and at least one of them works on Linux. I don't know what you're complaining about. Believe it or not, there are some people out there actually using Silverlight. Even more people use other Microsoft products by choice. Microsoft couldn't have possibly "bought off" all of them so just chill out. I'm not much of a Microsoft fan myself, but a little competition for Adobe in the online video/rich interface arena can only be a good thing.
  - Herring 18y ago
    That's what I keep telling linux people. We need more distros, not less. More window managers, more gentoo only websites, more binary blobs & more incompatibilities. Besides, reverse-engineering proprietary platforms is lots of fun.
  - Create 18y ago
    MS has always, and is still actively buying off educational and govt institutions: the nature of centralized corruption makes this possible. Not to speak of the preinstalled OS-es from vendors - for a casual end-user, there is almost no other choice (OK, apples at substantially higher price). Therefore, it is in the most rarest case, that MS (and silverlight) a conscious choice for most people: it is there "by default" both content provider and client side, and changing anything about this is highly non trivial (even for "technical" people: think W3C and HTML/ES etc.). http://www.theserverside.com/news/thread.tss?thread_id=49451 http://www.theserverside.com/news/thread.tss?thread_id=49451 http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD12xx/EWD1283.html http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD12xx/EW... How "they" try to corrupt "us" At my former university it was a firm principle of the informatics group that we would not teach our students how to use industrial products. The main reasons at the time were the quality of industrial products was never up to academic standards, and the market being as fickle as it is, the industrial product was of volatile significance only. Later I learned how much the purposes of the University and those of industry can diverge. Universities, believe it or not, are interested in education, but I learned of industries that were not interested in education at all, neither in an educated work force, nor in an educated customer base. On the contrary, they preferred a docile, brainwashed work force and undemanding customers hooked on their products. Another remark is that it is the task of a "leading University" to lead. In particular this means for us that we should give society not what it asks for, but what it needs. This issue is particularly acute for CS because their society asks for snake oil, for more of the same, though we all know that it hardly works. The above was triggered by a letter we received from one of our colleagues. I quote from it - "MS" presumably stands for "Microsoft"- : "We had a good meeting with MS representatives [...]. They were open to the possibility of giving us a significant number of graduate fellowships [...]. A key thing that MS wants in return is that our students have experience in programming in NT environments; they and other companies want such students. [...]" Well, that was a revealing meeting! For the record I quote from the following paragraph of that letter: "I believe a key to the MS support for our department will be clear evidence that we are using NT (or related software, e.g. CE). I need to collect information about your use of NT (or intended use of MS software) as part of our proposal." Since I do not want MS to sue me, I won't tell you how much I appreciate their offer. You must guess. For more detail I refer to the communications of the Chairman of the Board of "Mathematics Inc.", as published in [0]. For dominance of the Universities, see EWD539 in particular. [0] "Selected Writings on Computing: A Personal Perspective" by Edsger W.Dijkstra. Texts and Monographs in Computer Science, Springer-Verlag 1982 [ISBN: 0-387-90652-5] Austin, 21 February 1999 prof. dr Edsger W. Dijkstra Department of Computer Sciences The University of Texas at Austin Austin, TX 78712-1188 USA
viae 18y ago
This weekend I began to take a computer science course at the local community college. After the four hour class, in which the professor spent the first two hours talking about how accelerated the class was, and the 2nd two hours on how to install the JAVA SDK on Windows I immediately dropped the class. My decision was based on my personal findings that MIT, Berkeley, and Stanford's online offerings are superior even though I won't be able to interact with a mentor. While I'm happy that I'll be getting my $500 back (I think I'll put that money towards a cyclocross bike or Thule roof rack :cp), I'm appalled by the lack of accessibility to good mentorship at the community college level. Is my experience peculiar or is this pervasive? As an aside, the prof. also called the Windows CMD, Unix... not even "like" Unix. He said, "This is Unix." My head almost exploded. This was after he spent a good deal of time telling people there were lots of jobs in the Unix and Line-UX field...
- jackchristopher 18y ago
  Community colleges were designed to quickly train people for the post-war (WWII) economy. And since bureaucrats run them, you learn the industry demands...from yesterday. The students and teachers are there for "a better job"; No enthusiasm. And like any situation where people do things they don't want to, it sucks. And I think that is the real value of top universities, Y Combinator, or any great place. You get to do cool work with people who care about the same things you do. Find a way to emulate that. And I'm not trying to be negative about community college, or college in general. But if you do choose to go back; Use college, don't let it use you. And that's true for life in general as well. But ambitious people find a way; I'm self-taught. And while that would be scary to many people. Doing anything new is. And I feel alive.
  - gregwebs 18y ago
    I don't think you should be bashing things you don't know much about. It is one thing to point out that the quality of instruction and general level of interest of students is lower than at Universities. It is another to paint broad inaccurate strokes, pretend to understand their mission and label the people that run them as bureaucrats. There are many administrators, teachers, and students at community colleges that are interested and passionate about what they do.
gregfjohnson 18y ago
I'm a bit of a lurker on HN, but had to add a comment here. The Stanford online offerings are fantastic. I'm taking Stephen Boyd's "Introduction to Linear Dynamic Systems", and it is simply superb. The course is given at a rate of two lectures per week, but I've found that it fits into the rest of my life more conveniently to watch and absorb one lecture per week. Monday evenings are now my official "learn some new and important stuff" nights. "Linear dynamic systems" is the essential intellectual foundation of a scary number of different areas: control systems, modern financial modeling, statistical modeling and analysis, search, etc. The material is a bit difficult, but it's one of those areas that are widely applicable. I firmly believe that this whole area should be part of the core curriculum of any computer science program. It is right where more and more of the discipline is heading. I've wanted to learn this stuff for a while, and have banged my head against a few books in the area, tried to take a UCLA extension course, etc. But never have I encountered more clear, intuitive, and lucid explanations of this material than in Prof. Boyd's online lectures. This is one of those resources that make you wonder, "Why would an organization like Stanford but this on the web and give it away for free??" But if they are going to do it, then smart people sure as hell should take advantage of it.
- hrp 18y ago
  Absolutely fantastic class. Challenging, but, you're right, applicable to so many areas, disciplines, and industries.
- darragjm 18y ago
  "Why would an organization like Stanford [put] this on the web and give it away for free??" Because Stanford students like me pay the ginormous tuition that covers those costs and virtual losses of revenue. ;-)
- dmv 18y ago
  "Why would an organization like Stanford [put] this on the web and give it away for free??" The question is better put as to why should they not. Stanford is a non-profit institute devoted to education, the advancement of science, etc. At this time in history, one of the most cost-effective / high-impact means to fulfill their objectives is to produce this material on the web. The objective of a school like Stanford should not be to keep this material exclusive. There is no risk of going out of business -- the college experience plays too important a role for too many people. And there are tangible benefits to 'being there'; the networking plus the diploma can be helpful. A school like Stanford, or MIT already has to turn away way too many completely qualified and gifted applicants. Stanford can not effectively scale to address increased demand for the full experience. If it can help those it turned away to still learn, great. It is also important marketing on both a short and long term scale. On an immediate basis, a potential candidate now has an opportunity to look inside to see whether college, and Stanford, is right for them. If they don't consider the lectures worthwhile, it is better to know that now. On a longer time scale, this bolsters the reputation of Stanford by showing their excellence of education. The meme occasionally circulates that some of the Ivies (and their technical equivalents) are soft, coasting on wealth and their laurels. As a Carnegie Mellon graduate, I can now see how Berkeley, MIT, or Stanford's coursework measures up. [I am ashamed that my own alma mater continues to retreat in the other direction, and worry that this will be a long-term competitive disadvantage.] Likewise, as you describe, many may be convinced that a lower tier school is as comprehensive as the top tier. When we see these schools provide their lectures, a more fair comparison could be made prior to making a commitment.
ilamont 18y ago
The Harvard Extension School has a bunch of CS offerings available through the iTunes store, for free: http://itunes.extension.harvard.edu/ http://itunes.extension.harvard.edu/ It's also possible to take CS distance ed classes for credit via the Extension School website. I haven't taken any, but one student there says some of the undergraduate offerings have the same curricula as their Harvard College counterparts: http://www.cluehq.com/blog/2008/10/14/formal-systems-and-computation-is-kicking-my-ass/ http://www.cluehq.com/blog/2008/10/14/formal-systems-and-com... Note the for-credit offerings are not free.
varenc 18y ago
MIT's OCW has a whole lot more! No social networking aspect though. http://ocw.mit.edu http://ocw.mit.edu
sown 18y ago
But, alas, you get no credit...

99 points by tortilla 18y ago

I actually liked the classes by MIT and Berkley. They atleast have more variety for foundation level CS classes.

Perhaps my son's CS education won't cost $400,000/yr after all (he's 8 mos old). Yes, of course he'll be interested in programming.

Create 18y ago
Don't worry: it will not cost $400,000/yr. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UF8uR6Z6KLc http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UF8uR6Z6KLc

myelin 18y ago

I've been working through the CS229 (Machine Learning) notes - just the handouts, for now - and am finding them pretty uesful. There's a lot of good stuff in there that I didn't learn in Electrical Engineering at college.

benbeltran 18y ago

This whole open courseware trend is awesome. My university is doing a project to open its courses too, but focused more on helping south-american universities (I'm from Mexico, so yeah, spanish).

dbr 18y ago

Check out: http://www.ocwconsortium.org/use/use-dynamic.html http://www.ocwconsortium.org/use/use-dynamic.html My Favorites: http://webcast.berkeley.edu/courses.php http://webcast.berkeley.edu/courses.php http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/home/home/index.htm http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/home/home/index.htm

mhidalgo 18y ago
While these sites offer more variety, the current limited stanford offering has better quality. By quality I mean you get all the lecture videos , course notes, exams, and hw solutions. If you compare this to the relevant classes at MIT and Berkeley its just plain better. At MIT you have no video for their intro CS classes and you don't have access to all the lecture notes and Berkeley is just video. Kudos to Stanford , this has been a great resource to me.

swombat 18y ago

Silverlight?? WTF! Did they get bought off by Microsoft?

jm4 18y ago
They have multiple methods for accessing the videos, one of which is Silverlight. Two of the other methods work on Windows and Mac and at least one of them works on Linux. I don't know what you're complaining about. Believe it or not, there are some people out there actually using Silverlight. Even more people use other Microsoft products by choice. Microsoft couldn't have possibly "bought off" all of them so just chill out. I'm not much of a Microsoft fan myself, but a little competition for Adobe in the online video/rich interface arena can only be a good thing.
- Herring 18y ago
  That's what I keep telling linux people. We need more distros, not less. More window managers, more gentoo only websites, more binary blobs & more incompatibilities. Besides, reverse-engineering proprietary platforms is lots of fun.
- Create 18y ago
  MS has always, and is still actively buying off educational and govt institutions: the nature of centralized corruption makes this possible. Not to speak of the preinstalled OS-es from vendors - for a casual end-user, there is almost no other choice (OK, apples at substantially higher price). Therefore, it is in the most rarest case, that MS (and silverlight) a conscious choice for most people: it is there "by default" both content provider and client side, and changing anything about this is highly non trivial (even for "technical" people: think W3C and HTML/ES etc.). http://www.theserverside.com/news/thread.tss?thread_id=49451 http://www.theserverside.com/news/thread.tss?thread_id=49451 http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD12xx/EWD1283.html http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD12xx/EW... How "they" try to corrupt "us" At my former university it was a firm principle of the informatics group that we would not teach our students how to use industrial products. The main reasons at the time were the quality of industrial products was never up to academic standards, and the market being as fickle as it is, the industrial product was of volatile significance only. Later I learned how much the purposes of the University and those of industry can diverge. Universities, believe it or not, are interested in education, but I learned of industries that were not interested in education at all, neither in an educated work force, nor in an educated customer base. On the contrary, they preferred a docile, brainwashed work force and undemanding customers hooked on their products. Another remark is that it is the task of a "leading University" to lead. In particular this means for us that we should give society not what it asks for, but what it needs. This issue is particularly acute for CS because their society asks for snake oil, for more of the same, though we all know that it hardly works. The above was triggered by a letter we received from one of our colleagues. I quote from it - "MS" presumably stands for "Microsoft"- : "We had a good meeting with MS representatives [...]. They were open to the possibility of giving us a significant number of graduate fellowships [...]. A key thing that MS wants in return is that our students have experience in programming in NT environments; they and other companies want such students. [...]" Well, that was a revealing meeting! For the record I quote from the following paragraph of that letter: "I believe a key to the MS support for our department will be clear evidence that we are using NT (or related software, e.g. CE). I need to collect information about your use of NT (or intended use of MS software) as part of our proposal." Since I do not want MS to sue me, I won't tell you how much I appreciate their offer. You must guess. For more detail I refer to the communications of the Chairman of the Board of "Mathematics Inc.", as published in [0]. For dominance of the Universities, see EWD539 in particular. [0] "Selected Writings on Computing: A Personal Perspective" by Edsger W.Dijkstra. Texts and Monographs in Computer Science, Springer-Verlag 1982 [ISBN: 0-387-90652-5] Austin, 21 February 1999 prof. dr Edsger W. Dijkstra Department of Computer Sciences The University of Texas at Austin Austin, TX 78712-1188 USA

viae 18y ago

This weekend I began to take a computer science course at the local community college. After the four hour class, in which the professor spent the first two hours talking about how accelerated the class was, and the 2nd two hours on how to install the JAVA SDK on Windows I immediately dropped the class. My decision was based on my personal findings that MIT, Berkeley, and Stanford's online offerings are superior even though I won't be able to interact with a mentor. While I'm happy that I'll be getting my $500 back (I think I'll put that money towards a cyclocross bike or Thule roof rack :cp), I'm appalled by the lack of accessibility to good mentorship at the community college level. Is my experience peculiar or is this pervasive? As an aside, the prof. also called the Windows CMD, Unix... not even "like" Unix. He said, "This is Unix." My head almost exploded. This was after he spent a good deal of time telling people there were lots of jobs in the Unix and Line-UX field...

jackchristopher 18y ago
Community colleges were designed to quickly train people for the post-war (WWII) economy. And since bureaucrats run them, you learn the industry demands...from yesterday. The students and teachers are there for "a better job"; No enthusiasm. And like any situation where people do things they don't want to, it sucks. And I think that is the real value of top universities, Y Combinator, or any great place. You get to do cool work with people who care about the same things you do. Find a way to emulate that. And I'm not trying to be negative about community college, or college in general. But if you do choose to go back; Use college, don't let it use you. And that's true for life in general as well. But ambitious people find a way; I'm self-taught. And while that would be scary to many people. Doing anything new is. And I feel alive.
- gregwebs 18y ago
  I don't think you should be bashing things you don't know much about. It is one thing to point out that the quality of instruction and general level of interest of students is lower than at Universities. It is another to paint broad inaccurate strokes, pretend to understand their mission and label the people that run them as bureaucrats. There are many administrators, teachers, and students at community colleges that are interested and passionate about what they do.

gregfjohnson 18y ago

I'm a bit of a lurker on HN, but had to add a comment here. The Stanford online offerings are fantastic. I'm taking Stephen Boyd's "Introduction to Linear Dynamic Systems", and it is simply superb. The course is given at a rate of two lectures per week, but I've found that it fits into the rest of my life more conveniently to watch and absorb one lecture per week. Monday evenings are now my official "learn some new and important stuff" nights. "Linear dynamic systems" is the essential intellectual foundation of a scary number of different areas: control systems, modern financial modeling, statistical modeling and analysis, search, etc. The material is a bit difficult, but it's one of those areas that are widely applicable. I firmly believe that this whole area should be part of the core curriculum of any computer science program. It is right where more and more of the discipline is heading. I've wanted to learn this stuff for a while, and have banged my head against a few books in the area, tried to take a UCLA extension course, etc. But never have I encountered more clear, intuitive, and lucid explanations of this material than in Prof. Boyd's online lectures. This is one of those resources that make you wonder, "Why would an organization like Stanford but this on the web and give it away for free??" But if they are going to do it, then smart people sure as hell should take advantage of it.

hrp 18y ago
Absolutely fantastic class. Challenging, but, you're right, applicable to so many areas, disciplines, and industries.
darragjm 18y ago
"Why would an organization like Stanford [put] this on the web and give it away for free??" Because Stanford students like me pay the ginormous tuition that covers those costs and virtual losses of revenue. ;-)
dmv 18y ago
"Why would an organization like Stanford [put] this on the web and give it away for free??" The question is better put as to why should they not. Stanford is a non-profit institute devoted to education, the advancement of science, etc. At this time in history, one of the most cost-effective / high-impact means to fulfill their objectives is to produce this material on the web. The objective of a school like Stanford should not be to keep this material exclusive. There is no risk of going out of business -- the college experience plays too important a role for too many people. And there are tangible benefits to 'being there'; the networking plus the diploma can be helpful. A school like Stanford, or MIT already has to turn away way too many completely qualified and gifted applicants. Stanford can not effectively scale to address increased demand for the full experience. If it can help those it turned away to still learn, great. It is also important marketing on both a short and long term scale. On an immediate basis, a potential candidate now has an opportunity to look inside to see whether college, and Stanford, is right for them. If they don't consider the lectures worthwhile, it is better to know that now. On a longer time scale, this bolsters the reputation of Stanford by showing their excellence of education. The meme occasionally circulates that some of the Ivies (and their technical equivalents) are soft, coasting on wealth and their laurels. As a Carnegie Mellon graduate, I can now see how Berkeley, MIT, or Stanford's coursework measures up. [I am ashamed that my own alma mater continues to retreat in the other direction, and worry that this will be a long-term competitive disadvantage.] Likewise, as you describe, many may be convinced that a lower tier school is as comprehensive as the top tier. When we see these schools provide their lectures, a more fair comparison could be made prior to making a commitment.

ilamont 18y ago

The Harvard Extension School has a bunch of CS offerings available through the iTunes store, for free: http://itunes.extension.harvard.edu/ http://itunes.extension.harvard.edu/ It's also possible to take CS distance ed classes for credit via the Extension School website. I haven't taken any, but one student there says some of the undergraduate offerings have the same curricula as their Harvard College counterparts: http://www.cluehq.com/blog/2008/10/14/formal-systems-and-computation-is-kicking-my-ass/ http://www.cluehq.com/blog/2008/10/14/formal-systems-and-com... Note the for-credit offerings are not free.

varenc 18y ago

MIT's OCW has a whole lot more! No social networking aspect though. http://ocw.mit.edu http://ocw.mit.edu

sown 18y ago

But, alas, you get no credit...