Stanford curses question

[SuperMiguel]

Any of the curses at http://itunes.stanford.edu/ worth doing??

Computer Engineering student.

[amspire]

The courses are definitely worth doing, but the issue with free courses is it is very hard to get motivated. You will learn very little watching the videos. You will learn by spending many, many hours doing exercises and coding (for a programming course).

In a real university course that costs lots of real money, you will have nights you miss out on sleep in a desperate attempt to get an assignment completed on time. With free courses, it is hard enough to just stay awake, let alone work hard.

So if you want to seriously do a course, I think you need plan to keep you motivated before you even start. Do the course with friends. Have a programming idea with a deadline that you work on while doing the course. If you pick a course like Programming for the iPad, have a real project planned before you start, and set yourself a deadline for a date to submit the App to Apple for approval. It does not matter if the final App is not brilliant. It matters that you complete it, so that next time you can do it better.

If there is no plan, you will discover that there is nothing more boring then watching 30 hours of someone talking about programming (or whatever else the course is about).

Richard.

[westfw]

Probably.  If they're free, you don't have to get too much out of them before they have positive value.
I took the Stanford cryptography class at https://www.coursera.org/ and found it useful.  I also found it eye-opening in terms of how much "student-ing" I've forgotten, and how much "collegiate language" gets thrown around and taken for granted.  For instance, the crypto class was supposed to require no programming skills, and only "a bit of discreet probability" math knowledge, but used a bunch of set theory notation and mathematical proof language like you had taken a formal math class of some kind last semester.  Whereas as an EE '81 graduate, the last time I saw that sort of thing was ... 10th grade geometry.

Overall, I'd rate the experience as pretty similar to one of those large and impersonal "required" college classes, though the subject matter was more appropriate to a smaller and more interactive class.  I'd do another one...
About four times as many people did the first assignment, than took the "final exam."

The coursera class had an associated forum, and both the teachers and other students were pretty helpful.

[vk6zgo]

I didn't know they cursed any differently to any other University.
Or do they run a Witch/Wizard Degree?

[alm]

Other massive open online courses, like the already mentioned Coursera, are offered by Udacity and edX (formerly MITx). If you're interested in EE courses, then MITx offered an introductory EE course last spring and will probably offer it again next fall. They are also the most likely to offer additional EE courses. Coursera and especially Udacity are currently mainly focused on computer science courses. I'm guessing a CS101 or algorithms 101 course would be less useful for a CE student. This is a fairly new phenomena (I believe the first courses started in fall 2011), so expect the number of courses to ramp up within the next year or so.

The advantage of MOOCs over just a bunch of online lectures like MIT OCW or similar initiatives is that these courses provide you with exercises between video lecture segments, assignments with deadlines and a bunch of other students taking the same course. This makes it easier to keep motivated or get help if you get stuck.

[Mechatrommer]

I didn't know they cursed any differently to any other University.
Or do they run a Witch/Wizard Degree?

not at Stanford. goto Hogwart School of WizardCraft.

[rbola35618]

NPTEL is another of University engineering classes and is the most complete offering almost all the engineering diciplines featuring schools from India.