One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind. Well these words are pretty strong and allow me to explain them considering the openness of the online education. One small step taken by Sal Khan last year to launch Khan Academy has now inspired more people to teach millions of students online and that too for free. What Sal is doing is great and some smart people have borrowed the idea of Sal Khan and this idea is now helping in the democratization of the online education.
Couple of weeks back I have explained how two students of Columbia University has launched Codecadmy to teach people coding and ignite the interest in individuals about programming and computer science. Well both Codecademy & Codeyear were a major hit and so far and more than 370,000 people have registered for the weekly online programming lessons which teaches Javascript. So far Codeyear has offered lessons on weekly basis. I feel proud in saying that I have completed all the lessons for all the 3 weeks along with additional assignments and projects.
Based on the free online education in programming and coding there is more intresting news which I would like to share. Professor Sebastian Thrun (Professor of Computer Science and director of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at Stanford University) has resigned from Stanford to start his own online teaching venture which goes by the name of Udacity. Last fall Sebastian Thrun (who is also a Google research fellow working on driverless cars) along with Peter Norvig taught a free online course - "Introduction to Artificial Intelligence (AI)" to an overwhelming 160,000 people. According to Sebastian Thrun this experience was so rewarding that he decided to quit teaching 200 people in the class to teach hundreds and thousands online. To know more about the AI class taught by Sebastian Thrun last fall go here.
Exciting part is that Udacity will offer its first two courses (CS101 Building a Search Engine & CS373 Programming a Robotic Car) online starting from 20th of Februrary and I should not repeat again that they are free. “CS101 – Building a Search Engine” does not have any prerequisites and if you are someone who have never done programming can opt for this one. “CS373 Programming a Robotic Car” however require a solid foundation in programming plus some knowledge of Probablity and Linear Algebra. The coding language for CS373 will be Python. I have registered for CS101 and I am pretty excited about that. CS101 is a 7 week course and you can see the syllabus per week once you register.
So if this excites you then please login to the site of Udacity and register. Learning to code is just great but learning from someone who is an expert in this field and is having a proven track record is something which we all can wish for. I would like to say thanks to the efforts of these people who are driving this noble project and would like to make the coding main stream.
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