Hacker News Reader

There's the following algorithms class CS 261 (upper-level undergraduate/masters) and CS 361b (mostly aimed at phd students, though undergraduates take it). 161 covers all the material you would expect to see in an undergrad algorithms class. I'd be surprised if 261 or 361b are put online, since they're not usually recorded and (at least when I took them) have between 10 and 20 students.

View on HN

"I'd be surprised if 261 or 361b are put online, since they're not usually recorded and (at least when I took them) have between 10 and 20 students."

Isn't that the exact reason they should be put online though? If there are say 5,000 students worldwide (vs 150,000 for the AI course) that is still a massive multiple. I sincerely hope Stanford doesn't stop at the "Introduction to X" courses. The upcoming "Probablistic Graphics Models" class seems reasonably advanced, and is hopefully a harbinger of things to come.

I think smaller classes are trickier to online-ify in a way. With large lectures, they're already somewhat public, so recording them doesn't change things a lot. With a 10-person class, you often have more of a seminar-style discussion, with a lot of back-and-forth between students and professor and less of a pre-planned, one-way lecture. That might be harder to record well, and I think the seminar-style discussion might also suffer if students were "on the record", knowing that they were being broadcast rather than just chatting with the 10 people in the room.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com