New Stanford course - Anatomy | Hacker News Reader

New Stanford course - Anatomy

anatomy-class.org

80 pointsbuddhika41 comments

Arms only this time:

> This course will cover the region of upper limb. Subsequent courses will cover other body regions in a sequential manner.

Now all they need to do is make an advanced paid version. Find some grad students to run the thing so they can grade more complex assignments, and answer questions.

It does make me wonder if this is a beta for a real online degree program.

An interesting area may be to develop software that can grade assignments in different disciplines.

Sebastian Thrun tweeted about a $2000 master's degree in CS and later about a free one:

https://twitter.com/#!/SebastianThrun/status/117131953714642...

That's puffery. These courses are not Stanford quality. The lectures maybe, but not the homework and assessments, and there is no research at all.

Presumably the $2000 course fee would allow for more formal and rigorous assessments to be used (e.g. hiring a test centre and giving a written, hand-marked exam).

That said, I think the DB and ML class homeworks have been very good, given the limitations they have.

I hope these beta course credits will still count when they ship.

This is exactly what my girlfriend was looking for.

She's done a degree in surgery in Mandarin. This would be perfect for her to acquaint her knowledge of the body in english / latin terms. Thanks Stanford.

Not to take anything away from this course, but I found Prof. Marian Diamond's course simply incredible.

[Integrative Biology 131: General Human Anatomy](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9WtBRNydso)

How many of them are they going to put online?

It bothers me a little bit that all these classes have their own domain names, all of which border on spammy-sounding (e.g. generic-prescription-drugs.com).

I wonder why they aren't all under the same domain? All the classes I've seen so far seem to be the same underlying app.

Maybe they're just doing it that way so people can farm HN karma.

Yeah, Stanford thrives on HN Karma you know.

I think its because they just want to decentralize the system.

hardly the same app. I'm in both the AI and machine learning classes and while one has a full infra-structure for programming assignments and some other video-playback that I haven't seen anywhere else, the other one uses youtube videos with quizzes only at the end of the videos.

The AI class seems to be the exception. The AI class has a .com extension, while all the others have .org extensions. The AI class website runs on KnowLabs software, while all the others run on software developed by some Stanford students last summer.

Yes, and how long until somebody creates a parody/fake? The domain convention would make that very easy.

(I lack the humor though... The best thing I can come up with is probably something like dadaism-class.org.)

I'm waiting for class-class.org.

is dada not valid?

This is the question everyone wants answered. There are two possible answers.

1) This is a decentralized system. Stanford just circulated a memo (or in a lunch discussion, lets not obsess over how this happened) that prof Ng and Prof Jeniffer have done this amazing class where the world participated and everyone is happy. Now everyone is encouraged to use the site source (they haven't even changed the contact page or layout) and start the class of their own. Nobody knows for sure who is planning to put it up and it is highly decentralized.

2) Stanford is rolling them out slowly so every on of them gets their share of twitter/hn/reddit/fb time. Nobody steals the limelight.

We can know which new courses are going to happen if someone makes a whois program which does the search for -class.org where is any 6-7 letter word.

Maybe it's possible to use a paid service like this: http://www.domaintools.com/research/reverse-ip/?hostname=107...

Is there a mailing list i can subscribe to in order to receive new course updates?

I'm interested to see how successful these courses would be as you start moving out of programming related areas. ML, AI and DB would interest many programmers and has been a success but anatomy may not generate the same kind of interest. Kinda how the activity is high on stackoverflow but comparatively low on the other stackexchange sites.

Anatomy will draw in a lot of undergrads who want to go to med-school but don't have anatomy classes at their universities.

math-class.org is still available. How long before domain squarters start buying those?

There might have been a typo error for the start date. It says January 2011.

Didn't you already take time-travel-class.org next year?

Why does Stanford keep registering /using these generic domains for their courses? It comes off as slightly arrogant.

It comes off as slightly arrogant.

It's not obvious why you consider it arrogant so may be you should explain.

I personally think it is a good idea and keeps things simple. Combining them together probably requires more coordination and thought for the product--and at the end complicating it.

It's asserting Stanford's tacit ownership of the concept of "class", in a way. There's nothing there to indicate it's Stanford.

SAAS Class (http://www.saas-class.org/) is from US Berkeley, not Stanford, and is linked alongside all the others in each site's footer.

Huh. I withdraw my argument.

You can make this argument about any nice domain name. Does Facebook Inc have tacit ownership of the concept "facebook" (collection of photographs of people, in case you've forgotten the real meaning)? How is this greatly different?

Domains for large organisations are exceedingly complex webs of power and politics in most cases. Stanford is pretty big in an organisational sense (I don't really know, I am just assuming based on the amount of money they have in the bank). I wouldn't be surprised if they are using generic domains because it is easier than trying to get other departments, powerbrokers and administrations to all agree on something.

While I disagree with the arrogant label, I do wish that a standard class.stanford.edu or stanford.edu/class template was used. (Not to leave the domains open for others, but to prevent confusion later when the space gets more crowded, as I suspect it will.)

Arrogant how? I have no college education and I am currently developing a health application so I am extremely excited to have the opportunity to take these courses. There is nothing arrogant about this and not only do I applaud them for being the first school to do this but I hope that other schools ie: MIT etc... follow suit.

> I hope that other schools ie: MIT etc... follow suit.

Which is kind of his point - they will have to choose a domain that is either also generic (anatomy-course.org), which would be confusing, or use something like (mit-class.edu/anatomy) which is less memorable.

I wouldn't go as far as calling stanford arrogant though - they came first, everybody had the opportunity to do this for a decade.

MIT has been doing it for a decade, except for the coordinated enrollment (study groups) and automatically graded exercises (both of which are nice enhancements, but the ML class exercises are mostly pointless.) http://ocw.mit.edu/

What are they going to do for labs/dissections? What are they going to do for exams (or equivalent)?

This is still a very interesting idea/class and I hope it succeeds 100%.

To apply anatomy to a human body, you must first know what to look for and how to describe it. So I imagine they'll be spending some time on getting the Latin terms down, which help reduce the ambiguity.

Example: how do you describe the direction your thumb is pointing in? In anatomy they base it on the bones in your forearm, rather than saying 'outwards', because if you rotate your hand its no longer valid.

As for the testing: there are so many bones, muscles, nerves and organs in the body that it will take more than 10 weeks to cover them all in detail. Besides, knowing the name is one thing, knowing the function another.

A sample question I got in college: What are the effects of a unilateral paralysis of the femoral nerve? Ten points of karma if you get it right.

Gimped. Stiff leg. Limp.

I think you can do fine without dissections. I don't think very many intro to anatomy classes are going to involve everyone getting a human hand to play with.

Everybody (well, nearly everybody) has already got two. You might want to think hard about non-destructive testing, though.

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