There’s an interesting competition shaping up between Udacity and Coursera. Specializing in offering Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs), both ventures spun out of Stanford earlier this year. But they did so in very different ways.

Just about everybody these days is developing an app, right? A few lucky coders might see their work up in lights if they act fast.
Apps designed by the first 1,000 developers to register for Stanford’s new online course on iTunesU will be considered for showcasing on the university’s iTunes site.

Leonard Susskind — he’s the father of String Theory, someone who won the black hole wars with Stephen Hawking, and a Stanford professor who likes to bring physics to the broader public. (Find his 6-course introduction to Modern Theoretical Physics in the Physics section of our collection of Free Online Courses.

Scholars of ancient history and IT experts at Stanford University have collaborated to create a novel way to study Ancient Rome. ORBIS, a geospatial network model, allows visitors to experience the strategy behind travel in antiquity. (Find a handy tutorial for using the system on the Web and YouTube).

Stanford’s big open course initiative keeps rolling along.

Can one person experience love more deeply than another? That’s what The Stanford Center for Cognitive and Neurobiological Imaging and filmmaker Brent Hoff set out to understand when they hosted the 1st Annual Love Competition. Seven contestants, ranging from 10 to 75 years of age, took part.

What is a liberal education? And how can it help you live a more authentic and purposeful life? They are timely and timeless questions that get answered by The Art of Living, a team-taught course presented to Stanford freshmen. The first lecture (above) addresses these questions head on.

It happens at least a few times a day. Students look through our list of 400 Free Online Courses, and ask us whether they can get a certificate for taking a class. And, unfortunately, our answer has been no — no, you can’t. But that may be about to change.

Two weeks ago, we mentioned that Stanford will be rolling out seven new courses in its experiment with online learning. Fast forward to today, and yet another seven courses have been added to the winter lineup, bringing the total to 14.
Immediately below, you’ll find the latest additions.

This fall, Stanford launched a highly-publicized experiment in online learning. The university took three of its most popular computer science courses and made them freely available to the world.