Stanford is offering some of its most popular engineering classes for free
see.stanford.edu
see.stanford.edu
"Linear dynamic systems" is the essential intellectual foundation of a scary number of different areas: control systems, modern financial modeling, statistical modeling and analysis, search, etc. The material is a bit difficult, but it's one of those areas that are widely applicable.
I firmly believe that this whole area should be part of the core curriculum of any computer science program. It is right where more and more of the discipline is heading.
I've wanted to learn this stuff for a while, and have banged my head against a few books in the area, tried to take a UCLA extension course, etc. But never have I encountered more clear, intuitive, and lucid explanations of this material than in Prof. Boyd's online lectures.
This is one of those resources that make you wonder, "Why would an organization like Stanford but this on the web and give it away for free??" But if they are going to do it, then smart people sure as hell should take advantage of it.
Because Stanford students like me pay the ginormous tuition that covers those costs and virtual losses of revenue. ;-)
The question is better put as to why should they not. Stanford is a non-profit institute devoted to education, the advancement of science, etc. At this time in history, one of the most cost-effective / high-impact means to fulfill their objectives is to produce this material on the web.
The objective of a school like Stanford should not be to keep this material exclusive. There is no risk of going out of business -- the college experience plays too important a role for too many people. And there are tangible benefits to 'being there'; the networking plus the diploma can be helpful. A school like Stanford, or MIT already has to turn away way too many completely qualified and gifted applicants. Stanford can not effectively scale to address increased demand for the full experience. If it can help those it turned away to still learn, great.
It is also important marketing on both a short and long term scale. On an immediate basis, a potential candidate now has an opportunity to look inside to see whether college, and Stanford, is right for them. If they don't consider the lectures worthwhile, it is better to know that now. On a longer time scale, this bolsters the reputation of Stanford by showing their excellence of education. The meme occasionally circulates that some of the Ivies (and their technical equivalents) are soft, coasting on wealth and their laurels. As a Carnegie Mellon graduate, I can now see how Berkeley, MIT, or Stanford's coursework measures up. [I am ashamed that my own alma mater continues to retreat in the other direction, and worry that this will be a long-term competitive disadvantage.]
Likewise, as you describe, many may be convinced that a lower tier school is as comprehensive as the top tier. When we see these schools provide their lectures, a more fair comparison could be made prior to making a commitment.
This used to be called SITN (Stanford Instructional Television Network), and is apparently called SCPD ( http://scpd.stanford.edu ) now. Check out the offered courses. They cover full BS & MS+ in Computer Science and many other engineering fields.
Many large companies in SV are members, and offer mostly free access to Stanford courses to the employees. It's a nice perk and an advantage when recruiting. It's also a significant source of revenue for Stanford, something they will think twice about giving away. It's a standard problem of a market leader having to cannibalize it's own market. So, it's great if somewhat surprising to see Stanford starting out in this direction.
After the four hour class, in which the professor spent the first two hours talking about how accelerated the class was, and the 2nd two hours on how to install the JAVA SDK on Windows I immediately dropped the class.
My decision was based on my personal findings that MIT, Berkeley, and Stanford's online offerings are superior even though I won't be able to interact with a mentor.
While I'm happy that I'll be getting my $500 back (I think I'll put that money towards a cyclocross bike or Thule roof rack :cp), I'm appalled by the lack of accessibility to good mentorship at the community college level. Is my experience peculiar or is this pervasive?
As an aside, the prof. also called the Windows CMD, Unix... not even "like" Unix. He said, "This is Unix." My head almost exploded. This was after he spent a good deal of time telling people there were lots of jobs in the Unix and Line-UX field...
The students and teachers are there for "a better job"; No enthusiasm. And like any situation where people do things they don't want to, it sucks.
And I think that is the real value of top universities, Y Combinator, or any great place. You get to do cool work with people who care about the same things you do. Find a way to emulate that.
And I'm not trying to be negative about community college, or college in general. But if you do choose to go back; Use college, don't let it use you. And that's true for life in general as well.
But ambitious people find a way; I'm self-taught. And while that would be scary to many people. Doing anything new is. And I feel alive.
All I can say is that there are some awful teachers like the one above saying DOS is Unix and such complete nonsense, but I've also come across some of the most amazing teachers that even my now-in-4-year-universities friends from high school wish they had for some of the classes we share. Yes, the level of education is not the same, but for the general classes, it's not so different, and sometimes can be a unique and nice experience. Plus, you can transfer, and those classes can count towards your degree. Not everyone is in a CC to get a better job, a lot of people end up transferring to such "top" universities like UCLA, UC Berkeley, Stanford, USC and the like (is it obvious I live in California? :) )
Lastly, none of this is stopping me from supplementing my education on my own. There are some topics that are rarely taught in many places (like, say, Mac/iPhone programming) I'm interested in. I would hope that's the case with anyone and everyone, not just people involved in top universities and Y Combinator :p
My points:
1) They were made to quickly train people for post-war jobs.
2) Being government run makes them especially bureaucratic. And because of that they are slow to change. They teach you the outmoded industry demands. (A.k.a classes on Java/C = You'll program Windows. Python/Ruby = Web apps). And I'm not saying those languages are not useful.
But top colleges have this problem too. It's a society-wide problem actually. Our knowledge is increasing and changing things faster than people can keep up.
But opening up courses and materials helps. Not to mention the effect of the net in general.
3) The original purpose of CCs influences their operation today. And they've had to shift purposes.
And it's hard to change any organization; just like people. But not only is are CCs larger in scale but politicians run them.
The problem they're trying to solve changed...a few times.
By my quick account:
How do we do quick job training post-war? How do we restructure for incoming baby-boomers? What do we do with their children in the age of the internet?
And that's probably not how they framed them. But I don't have enough time to come up with better questions.
4) Enthusiasm is low. The standards to get in are low; For teachers and students. And while I forgot about transfer students, I think they add to my point not detract from it.
Those people want to blow through CCs. But I think you agree with me about student and teacher motivation in general.
Most people don't know what they want to do with their lives; Whether before college, during college, or after it. Most don't even know on their deathbeds.
And those who even ask the question, end up settling way too early; It's a hard problem. And you're supposed to figure it out before 17?
And I was advocating self-learning; Not going to any college. Whether they're good according to US Weekly's algorithm or not; I'm the last defender of the university.
But I did recommend emulating what the most valuable part of those places; Doing stuff with people who actually want to do it.
Side Note:
I thought my post was balanced; I don't intend to ever write negatively. Thank you for the feedback. You forced me to explain myself the long way.
This post is sloppily written too.
If you wanted to tackle this deficit with an online matching service, the domain onlinecoursementors.com is available!
(Actually, I'd recommend a more figurative domain name, but you get the idea.)
Arts education is a steal. You can find classes with reasonably successful faculty. I'm currently taking screenwriting at De Anza and enjoyed short fiction classes with Bob Bausch (http://www.robertbausch.org/) back in Virginia. With workshop-style classes, there can be wider variation in talent-levels and enthusiasm yet not be a show-stopper in helping you move forward with your skills. These faculty can also be very accessible for personal review of your work.
Comp sci/programming is another story. It'd be too frustrating to take courses at the CC level because of the pace, although even here, I can see a problem-based course accommodating different levels of skill and interest.
The availability of all these internet courses will make a dramatic impact to education. I would have killed to have access to this stuff back in high school. Makes me wonder what impact it might have on the community colleges, especially if states force reuse of exemplary open material.
http://itunes.extension.harvard.edu/
It's also possible to take CS distance ed classes for credit via the Extension School website. I haven't taken any, but one student there says some of the undergraduate offerings have the same curricula as their Harvard College counterparts:
http://www.cluehq.com/blog/2008/10/14/formal-systems-and-com...
Note the for-credit offerings are not free.
Yes, of course he'll be interested in programming.
Did they get bought off by Microsoft?
Believe it or not, there are some people out there actually using Silverlight. Even more people use other Microsoft products by choice. Microsoft couldn't have possibly "bought off" all of them so just chill out.
I'm not much of a Microsoft fan myself, but a little competition for Adobe in the online video/rich interface arena can only be a good thing.
http://www.theserverside.com/news/thread.tss?thread_id=49451
http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD12xx/EW...
How "they" try to corrupt "us"
At my former university it was a firm principle of the informatics group that we would not teach our students how to use industrial products. The main reasons at the time were the quality of industrial products was never up to academic standards, and the market being as fickle as it is, the industrial product was of volatile significance only.
Later I learned how much the purposes of the University and those of industry can diverge. Universities, believe it or not, are interested in education, but I learned of industries that were not interested in education at all, neither in an educated work force, nor in an educated customer base. On the contrary, they preferred a docile, brainwashed work force and undemanding customers hooked on their products.
Another remark is that it is the task of a "leading University" to lead. In particular this means for us that we should give society not what it asks for, but what it needs. This issue is particularly acute for CS because their society asks for snake oil, for more of the same, though we all know that it hardly works.
The above was triggered by a letter we received from one of our colleagues. I quote from it - "MS" presumably stands for "Microsoft"- :
"We had a good meeting with MS representatives [...]. They were open to the possibility of giving us a significant number of graduate fellowships [...]. A key thing that MS wants in return is that our students have experience in programming in NT environments; they and other companies want such students. [...]"
Well, that was a revealing meeting! For the record I quote from the following paragraph of that letter:
"I believe a key to the MS support for our department will be clear evidence that we are using NT (or related software, e.g. CE). I need to collect information about your use of NT (or intended use of MS software) as part of our proposal."
Since I do not want MS to sue me, I won't tell you how much I appreciate their offer. You must guess. For more detail I refer to the communications of the Chairman of the Board of "Mathematics Inc.", as published in [0]. For dominance of the Universities, see EWD539 in particular.
[0] "Selected Writings on Computing: A Personal Perspective" by Edsger W.Dijkstra. Texts and Monographs in Computer Science, Springer-Verlag 1982 [ISBN: 0-387-90652-5]
Austin, 21 February 1999
prof. dr Edsger W. Dijkstra Department of Computer Sciences The University of Texas at Austin Austin, TX 78712-1188 USA
The type of work that I do exposes me to many types of web technologies at many different organizations. This is purely anecdotal, but there is real interest in Silverlight among heavy users of Microsoft technologies. Adoption is very low right now, but there are quite a few shops testing the waters. And why not? If you don't care about multi-platform interoperability it's actually pretty nice. If I had to guess I'd say there are more shops like that out there than ones who develop platform-independent applications. I think this is a very bad idea, but these organizations are making a conscious decision to operate like this. They could just as easily choose to use platform-independent and open source tools, but they're not doing it. Microsoft isn't paying them all.
Because of software patents.
Microsoft isn't paying them all.
No, it is threatening them all if they don't pay. In the name of "innovation".
Did you completely miss the point I was trying to make? You and I may not like Microsoft products because of their proprietary nature, but there are plenty of customers making a conscious decision to use them despite this. In fact, quite a few of them probably choose Microsoft specifically because of this.
No, it is threatening them all if they don't pay. In the name of "innovation".
I don't even know where to start here. I'm going to completely overlook that "innovation" remark because your poor use of the English language makes it impossible for me to figure out what you're trying to say.
Do you realize that you've contradicted yourself here? First, you cite examples of Microsoft paying people off to use their software. Now they are threatening them if they don't pay? Which one is it?
If what you're getting at is all that BSA nonsense I'll bite on that. The companies that get bullied by Microsoft and the BSA have chosen to use Microsoft software. Many of them are using it illegally. Either way, that's something they have opened themselves up to by using Microsoft software. Do I think it sucks? Absolutely. That's why I choose my software carefully. Microsoft is not like the Mafia showing up at your door demanding money as soon as you set up shop. They are demanding money - whether right or wrong - from people already using their software.
Ten years ago your arguments would have held a lot more water. I may have even made those arguments myself. But things have changed considerably over the last several years. We have real alternatives to Microsoft software. In many cases we have acceptable interoperability between Microsoft products and their open source equivalents. The fact is you can get by in a mostly Windows world without ever touching a Microsoft product so I tend to think the primary cause of complaints like these is the stupidity of the people who still use software that doesn't fulfill their needs.