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The Stanford School of Engineering released 10 of their courses on to the World Wide Web, free of charge. The initiative, called Stanford Engineering Everywhere (SEE), is bound to be popular.

The Stanford School of Engineering in America has issued 10 courses on the internet. Students will be able to study with Stanford Engineering Everywhere (SEE) for free.

The courses are divided into three main categories. The first is an Introduction to Computer Science, and includes Programming Methodology, Programming Abstractions and Programming Paradigms.

The second subject area is Artificial Intelligence, and includes the courses: an Introduction to Robotics, Natural Language Processing, and Machine Learning.

The third subject area is Linear Systems and Optimization, and includes The Fourier Transform and its Applications, an Introduction to Linear Dynamical Systems, and Convex Optimization I and II.

The pilot project includes various materials, such as exams, transcripts and handouts. Video lectures are also at students’ disposal.

The majority of Stanford undergraduates take the three-course Introduction to Computer Science, proving its popularity. The seven remaining courses in electrical engineering and artificial intelligence are more advanced.

Dean of the Stanford Engineering School, Jim Plummer, said, “We are excited to extend our teaching and learning opportunities worldwide through SEE. We hope SEE will enable a broad range of people to learn, to share their ideas and to make their own contributions to knowledge.”

John Lilly, CEO of Mozilla Corp, an open-source software development company (creator of popular tools such as the Firefox web browser and Thunderbird email client), and a Stanford CS alumnus, said: “The introductory CS sequence at Stanford provided me so much – programming fundamentals, of course – but more importantly, they provided me many of the basic building blocks that I still use to think about software, products and organizations with today.”

“These classes were among the most useful of my time at Stanford, and I’m really excited to see Stanford making them widely available under a Creative Commons license.”

Students can select all of the courses of interest, or only some, depending on the individual’s need. The course materials are no different from the course materials used by Stanford students.

The programme is released under the Creative Commons licence, meaning that course videos and materials may be reused, as long as proper attribution is acknowledged.

Educators worldwide are encouraged to use the free material in their own classrooms where they can tailor course material to match the needs of their students.

By Jansie Blom posted January 16, 2009 10:11 AM with 1,374 views