It's interesting to see the school simultaneously make a big push for free educational content online while also expanding it's for-profit online reach.
One would hope they are working towards a sustainable model for efficiently allocating education services, and doing so will require reasonable fees for some courses.
With the cost of a college education skyrocketing, and "open source" education in its infancy, the moves and adaptations of the big players are just interesting to watch, is all I meant.
I believe the next 10 years will birth new forms of socially-acceptable higher education, which is a pretty big deal, since the system we have to day is pretty ancient.
MIT, with it's strict "information should be free" policy. Stanford, with a mixed bag approach. Harvard, with it's extension school. Johns Hopkins, with it's satellite campuses in other countries.. The big schools are all trying out different strategies to offer a variety of bundles for students looking for education.
If Stanford then offered the next level of AI class online, but charged $1K? $3K for it, they'd get all their money back. Could turn into a classic Freemium model.
On the upside, this would probably be better for students as a whole, because most of them have no idea what they're really interested in. The ability to take all the intro classes for free and then pay for the ones that are more interesting to them is pretty interesting, from a macro-societal point of view.
The paid-certificate program is run by the Stanford Center for Professional Development ("SCPD"), and is a trimmed down version of the online masters program. Costs here are high because courses are usually paid for by an employer investing in employee training; the SCPD program (like masters programs in general) is a profit center.
The db-class, ml-class, ai-class websites (and their video-only equivalents through openclassroom and classx) are being run by the professors who teach the classes, and the goal is education.
There isn't a "Stanford" policy on how online instruction should operate; just different members of a single club working independently.
The education is free but the credentials aren't?