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Stanford moves classes online to deal with coronavirus outbreak
Online education is about to get a major (if short) field test. Stanford University is moving the last two weeks of winter quarter classes online "to the extent feasible" to reduce the chances of COVID-19 spreading on campus. There will be no classes in person starting March 9th, the school said. To help with the abrupt transition, the university will both provide "further guidance and tools" and encourage professors to cancel classes outright on March 9th if they need time to adapt their remaining classes.
Google offers free online course to turn you into a 'power searcher'
If you're game for learning some new search tricks, they may as well come from the hive mind itself. Mountain View is currently accepting registrations for "Power Searching with Google," a free-of-charge virtual course which will start on July 10th and involve six 50-minute interactive classes spread over two weeks. In addition to plugging Google+ at every opportunity, it promises to explain how to "solve real, everyday problems" using advanced search features -- and there's even a certificate at the end of it. Sign up at the course homepage linked below.
MIT and Harvard announce edX web education platform, make online learning cheap and easy
We'll forgive you if you failed to take MIT up on its offer take its courses for free when it rolled out its MITx online learning platform last year. However, Harvard took notice of its efforts, and has joined MIT online to form the edX platform and offer courses and content for free on the web. There's no word on the available subjects just yet, but video lessons, quizzes and online labs will all be a part of the curriculum, and those who comprehend the coursework can get a certificate of mastery upon completion. edX won't just benefit those who log on, either, as it'll be used to research how students learn and how technology can be used to improve teaching in both virtual and brick and mortar classrooms. The cost for this altruistic educational venture? 60 million dollars, with each party ponying up half. The first courses will be announced this summer, and classes are slated to start this fall. Want to know more? Check out the future of higher education more fully in the PR and video after the break.
MIT to launch MITx learning platform, offer free teaching materials in 2012
Want a degree from MIT without the expense or notoriously selective application process? Well, you're still out of luck, we're afraid, but the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's new MITx online learning system will at least give you a chance to access a variety of course materials for free. The institution will also make the MITx platform available to other schools for publishing their own content, and will even offer assessments with the option of earning a certificate of completion -- issued by a not-for-profit entity with a "distinct name to avoid confusion," of course. Naturally, "online-only non-MIT learners" will not have the same level of access as MIT students, who will also use the platform to access their own course material, but won't have the option of replacing an on-campus experience with exclusively online classes. MITx is scheduled to go live next spring, but you can get a head start on that fictional MIT degree by checking out OpenCourseWare, which has been serving up similar content for the better part of a decade.
Stanford schooling unwashed masses with free online Intro to Artificial Intelligence (video)
If you fancy yourself a Stanford (wo)man, but lack the requisite dollars to actually attend, now's your chance to collect those collegiate bragging rights. Starting October 10th, you can join Professor Sebastian Thrun and Google's Director of Research, Peter Norvig, in a free, online version of the school's Introduction to Artificial Intelligence course. The class covers, "knowledge representation, inference, machine learning, planning and game playing, information retrieval, and computer vision and robotics," and ambitiously aims to be the largest online AI course ever taught. If you're feeling the ole red and white, you can register at the source link below, but if you're looking for the official Stanford stamp of approval, we're afraid you're barking up the wrong tree -- non-students will receive a certificate of completion from the instructors only. Still interested? Check out the video introduction after the break and hit the source for more details.
Over one million downloads for Stanford's iPhone dev course
Here's a telling sign of the popularity of iPhone development: we posted about an online course being offered by Stanford just a few months ago, and in that time, the course has been downloaded over a million times through iTunes. The director of iTunes U at Apple says this is the fastest any course has ever hit the million mark.Only those attending Stanford will get credit for completing the 10-week course, but the material is available to the public right there in iTunes. And of course there are lots of ways to learn how to make apps on the iPhone -- Auntie TUAW has answered that question, and we've even got an iPhone Dev 101 series to help you wrap your mind around all of it. The iPhone itself seems made for newbies, and considering that there's apparently lots of money to be had in Ye Olde App Store, it's no surprise that people are flocking in huge numbers to the documentation.Whether any of those apps are any good, of course, is still up in the air. But who knows -- someone who starts with the free iTunes U course might one day be a game-changing designer. There's got to be at least one winner in those million downloaders, right?
