The courses generally feature interactive video clips; short quizzes that provide instant feedback; the ability to pose high value questions to Stanford instructors; feedback on your overall performance in the class; and a statement of accomplishment at the end of the course.
And, yes, the courses are free and now open for enrollment.
As always, don’t miss our big list of 425 Free Online Courses. It may just be the single most awesome page on the web.
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. And the remainder of the course (17 videos) puts the initial thinking into practice, using great works of literature and philosophy to explore what it means to live a well-lived life. Socrates, Plato, Shakespeare, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Toni Morrison all guide the way. Taught by Lanier Anderson, Kenneth Taylor and Joshua Landy, the Stanford course puts you in a position to address “fundamental and enduring questions about what it means to be human.” Whether you work in business, science or the arts, you will get something big out of the class.
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.
Earlier this fall, Stanford launched a highly-publicized series of free courses that offer students something novel: the ability to take tests and receive a “statement of accomplishment” from the instructor — though not the school itself — if they pass the class. (Stanford will launch 14 more courses starting in January and February. Click link for details.)
Now, MIT wants to up the ante on the certification of free courses. Starting next spring, the university, already famous for its OpenCourseWare project, will launch MITx, an e‑learning initiative that will offer certificates to students demonstrating mastery of free MIT courses. According to a new set of FAQs, the certificates won’t bear MIT’s name. Rather, “MIT plans to create a not-for-profit body within [MITx] that will offer certification for online learners of MIT coursework. That body will carry a distinct name to avoid confusion.” The courses will be free; the certificates will cost just a “modest” sum. It’s all a big step in the right direction.
UPDATE: You can find a list of free courses offering certificates from great universities here.
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. All of these courses feature interactive video clips; short quizzes that provide instant feedback; the ability to pose high value questions to Stanford instructors; and feedback on your overall performance in the class.
Courses start in January and February. Enroll today for free. And, if something doesn’t pique your interest below, don’t miss our big list of 400 Free Online Courses.
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. Each course features interactive video clips; short quizzes that provide instant feedback; and the ability to pose high value questions to Stanford instructors. The response? It has been nothing short of amazing. One course alone (Introduction to Artificial Intelligence) pulled in more than 58,000 enrollments.
Starting in January and February 2012, Stanford will offer seven new courses, and they’re all open for enrollment today. Here’s the new list (and don’t forget to browse through our collection of 400 Free Online Courses):
Back in 2009, Stanford University started recording lectures given in its iPhone Application Development course and then placing them on iTunes, making them free for anyone to view. The course hit a million downloads in a matter of weeks, and now, two years later, here’s where we stand. The course remains the most popular item on Stanford’s iTunesU site, having clocked in 10 million downloads. And the school has released a new version of the course that focuses on iOS 5, the latest version of the iPhone/iPad operating system. You can download the course on iTunes (in HD video or standard-definition video) and start creating apps on your own.
The iPhone Application Development course is now listed in the Computer Science section of our big collection of Free Online Courses. There you will find 40+ free courses that will teach you to code.…
As the French like to say, plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. The more things change, the more they stay the same. Before there was Twitter, Facebook and Google+ (click to follow us), Europeans living in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had to deal with their own version of information overload. Emerging postal systems, the proliferation of short letters called billets, and the birth of newspapers and pamphlets all pumped unprecedented amounts of information — valuable information, gossip, chatter and the rest — through newly-emerging social networks, which eventually played a critical role in the French Revolution, much like Twitter and Facebook proved instrumental in organizing the Arab Spring.
These historical social networks are being carefully mapped out by scholars at Stanford. Above, we have Anaïs Saint-Jude painting the historical picture for us. Below Dan Edelstein gives you a closer look at Stanford’s Mapping the Republic of Letters project.
This fall, professors from Stanford’s prestigious School of Engineering will offer online three of its most popular computer science courses: Machine Learning, Introduction to Artificial Intelligence and Introduction to Databases. (You can sign up by clicking on these links.) The courses will feature short, interactive video clips that students can watch whenever and wherever they want; short quizzes that provide instant feedback; and the ability to rank questions to be answered by Stanford instructors. According to the Stanford Report, “Already more than 58,000 people have expressed interest in the artificial intelligence course taught by Sebastian Thrun, a Stanford research professor of computer science and a Google Fellow, and Google Director of Research Peter Norvig.”
This isn’t the first time Stanford has offered free computer science courses to the world. Back in 2008, Stanford Engineering Everywhere presented lectures from 10 complete online computer science and electrical engineering courses. This includes the three-course “Introduction to Computer Science” sequence taken by the majority of Stanford undergraduates. These courses are all listed in the Computer Science and Electrical Engineering sections of our big collection of Free Online Courses. H/T @eugenephoto
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Stanford’s big open course initiative keeps rolling along. On March 12, three new courses will get underway:
