As another sample, I'll say I'm far from feeling swindled. I was a bit disappointed that the publicly available ML class and its Stanford equivalent only differed in one optional discussion a week - but I certainly don't feel the time taken developing the class took away from the in person experience, and I do think Andrew Ng and the staff were more available for Stanford students than they were for those taking the class online (which I view as the justification for the Stanford tuition costs).

The cryptography class I'm taking this quarter is more to my liking in that aspect, as in addition to the video lectures (which I assume will make up the bulk of the public offering), there is another 2 hours of lecture and a discussion that cover additional material. In this kind of a set up, the added benefit for the Stanford students from an educational standpoint certainly seems more tangible.

I find this attitude really strange. The value in going to Stanford isn't that you get to take the physical classes, it's that you can walk up to Prof. Ng's office (and/or similar caliber profs) and have a chat, and more importantly target yourself to be doing some research under them before you graduate.

Having merely taken a class with someone big in the field (especially a large class) is essentially an interesting point of trivia to bring up at dinner sometime. If anything these online courses are about demonstrating that the scarcity of chairs in a great professors classroom is rather artificial. Having done research under (even if it's pretty trivial stuff you personally do) someone great will really have an impact on your career.

If you're an undergrad and your not spending a good amount of your time talking one on one with researchers you have access to you're not taking advantage of a huge benefit of attending a university.

My response to this mentality is the same as when MIT students scoffed at OCW: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2067985.

I'm currently enrolled in Daphne Koller's Probabilistic Graphical Models, which will be offered later this quarter as online class. The sentiment among my friends is largely positive. First of all, personally I embrace the entire philosophy of moving toward better educational models that leverage technological progress, I am excited to be caught up in the transition, and I am more proud to be a student here. But more importantly, the instructors put more effort into the courses now that they are online, so we benefit directly from better prepared exercises, more of them, better structure of the class, etc. Naturally, there is a difference between how much preparation goes into teaching 50 people in a room compared to teaching 50,000 while spearheading educational revolution.