This fall Stanford University took a step forward in the open-education movement by offering three free online courses, following in the footsteps of several other elite colleges like Yale University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The three classes being offered—"Machine Learning,” “Introduction to Artificial Intelligence,” and “Introduction to Databases"—are among some of the university’s most popular computer-science courses, according to a blog post on the Open Culture Web site. Enrollment figures for the courses seemingly back up this claim: Andrew Ng, the professor for the machine-learning course, has approximately 94,000 students enrolled in his class alone, he told The Chronicle.
Students in the class includes high schoolers, grandmothers, and soldiers fighting in Afghanistan. “Teaching tens of thousands of students at a time is a very gratifying experience,” he said.
These online courses are particularly noteworthy because they go beyond taped lectures, which the university offers through its iTunes U and YouTube services. Building off an idea developed by Stanford’s Daphne Koller, a computer-science professor, students in the courses, offered this fall, skip the traditional long lecture. Instead, they progress at their own pace using short, interactive video lectures that are punctuated every five to eight minutes with questions to make sure the student grasps the concept before continuing to the next idea.
It’s a lot like the way Mr. Ng teaches his students in the physical classroom, but in some ways the online medium is even more interactive, he says. “My experience as an instructor is that when I ask a question in class, 20 percent of the students are on Facebook, 50 percent are still scribbling away at their notes, and the one smarty pants in the front row answers the question.” Online, all the students answer the questions and gets automated feedback on their work.
It’s not the professor answering the students, though; it’s the computer. The professors do not actually interact with the students. The software does provide them with automated feedback, which Mr. Ng says will often pick up on a student’s specific error. There are also Q&A forums where the students can chat with each other.
The free classes, while they do offer the same information taught to students enrolled at the university, don’t come with any course credit toward a Stanford degree. But students are expected to keep up with readings and assignments, Sebastian Thrun, the professor who runs the artificial-intelligence course, said in an article about the classes on Stanford’s Web site. And students should expect to spend at least 12 hours a week on his course, he said.
Classes are offered as part of the Stanford Engineering Everywhere initiative, which is financed by venture capital firm Sequoia Capital.
