Free Ivy-League Education

 After I mentioned theScienceNetwork in the previous post and you might already be aware of sites such as SciVee.tv, labtube.tv and iTunes U it’s time to share some recent links in the area of online-courses:

First, with a biological focus, there is iBioSeminars accompanied by iBioMagazine – let me just highlight this talk by David Baltimore.

On the computational side, there is udacity which was started by former Stanford professor and Google fellow Sebastian Thrun. He developed a vision for “University 2.0” under the motto of “democratizing higher education”. After having experienced that he could reach out to more people in a better way by a single online course than he could have by traditional teaching (even in huuuge overcrowded lecture halls) during the next couple of years he just couldn’t go back to the olden ways. He really has a point in dumping his professorship I heartily agree with, and that’s an understatement. I highly recommend to check out his talk at DLD (hosted by the gorgeous Maria Furtwängler), here is a teaser-trailer for the CS101-class “Building a Search Engine”:

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(You might want to check out this previous post on the online courses at Stanford)

To round things up, at the moment there is a free introductory course on Machine Learning “Learning from Data” ongoing at Caltech by Professor Yaser Abu-Mostafa covering basic theory, algorithms, and applications. Registration is still possible, the previous lectures are available here.

Video et studio, ergo sum.