I just received an interesting email:
Quote:
AI Class E-mail Robot hal@ai-class.com
11:42 PM (14 hours ago)
to me
Hi [Student],
Thank you for your interest in AI Class and congratulations to those who
successfully graduated. We were totally amazed that over 23,000 students
made it all the way to the end in a Stanford graduate-level class.
Due to popular demand, we are teaching a follow-up class: AI for
Robotics at Udacity - Educating the 21st Century . Also due to popular demand, we now have
a programming environment, so you can develop and test software. Our
goal is to teach you to program a self-driving car in 7 weeks. This
is a topic very close to my heart, and I am eager to share it with
you. (This class builds on the concepts in ai-class, but ai-class is
NOT required).
We are also launching an introduction to programming class, where
students will learn to program a search engine, without any prior
knowledge of programming. This will be great for students new to
computer science.
We are doing this with a new university: Udacity. In the next months,
we will offer an entire computer science curriculum through Udacity,
and offer certification services so that an entire degree can be obtained
online.
I would love to see you in class again! I would also love if you could
help us spread the word and recruit students. Udacity is an experiment
in democratizing education, in making free education available for
everyone in the world. It can only succeed if you join us and help
spread the word.
Sebastian
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I wonder if the delay in launching the next quarter of online Stanford classes has got anything to do with this. Anyway I hope he pulls this off. This would bring higher education within the reach of millions if not billions of people who would not have the chance otherwise. I don't think they are accredited but who knows what will happen. Even so, precocious autodidacts everywhere will gobble this up.