Introduction to Artificial Intelligence at Stanford (for free!)

Heya,

A couple of days ago I stumbled across an offering by Standford University to follow their "Introduction to AI" course for free. Basically this is an internet-streamed version of their live course that regular students get. It includes homework and exams including grading (yet you earn no credits if you're not a Stanford student).

I've signed up for this out of pure curiosity (I've studied the material before). But what I'm wondering is, given that 10.000's of people have already signed up, is this a good method to provide higher education to the masses? Will this just be a gimmick? Or is this going to evolve in such a way as to render universities (largely) useless?

Regards,
Tjippy

btw, for anyone wondering: you can signup here: http://www.ai-class.com/

 

That's interesting, please keep us posted on how this turns out.
Yours
Zweiblumen

 

Hi Tippy

This reminds me of the question posed to philosophy students: "Where is the University"

Exploring answering takes us quickly beyond identifying it with a set of buildings, and into the realm of function and purpose, perhaps chunking down to procedures required to fulfil them.

I believe the internet has the communication channels and vessels needed to fulfil everything which does need live access to equipment or in-the-room face to face contact.

Leaving behind, like Kindle, the problem of fitting physical bodies in to limited space, then 'the masses' could, perhaps, because self-selecting, rather than queuing up to join a group of people attached to a building and limited resources for accommodation.

I can easily envisage Skype conferences for Seminars and student study-groups.

Assessment would pose challenges. Whether taking papers out of a lecture-room, or dowloading emailed texts, one examiner would, or should have a similar pace of assessment of essays. Exponential growth of student body would place a strain.

One solution would be to make more of the exam one which can be judged electronically ... more multiple choice. Ewwwwwwww. I don't like that, but it is a 'way'.

Something which might affect the need for such a solution is that, by offering global-access university level education, we'd find out to what extend the process of self selection increases the number of students.

In the ideal case, I reckon there would still be the bottleneck of the many being examined by the few. And, like you are encountering, graded outcomes for people studying the material at home, rather than in the physical buildings and campus.