Coursera free online courses
[Update: Actually, some of the courses are not Stanford's but Berkeley's, California U's, and more... which can be grouped under the Coursera umbrella. I just updated the post title to reflect this.]
I’ve been keeping an eye on Stanford University‘s free online courses, most of which are starting this month. They look like an interesting (and affordable!) way to gather new knowledge/skills at your own pace. Teachers are renowned professionals and academics, and the multimedia format of the courses look like they’ll be fun and comfortable to follow (they consist of video lectures, transcripts, slides, assignments and quizzes). Here’s the list of announced courses (please let me know if I’m missing anything):
- Human-computer Interaction, by Scott Klemmer
- Anatomy, Dr. Sakti Srivastava
- Making Green Buildings, by Martin Fischer
- Information Theory, by Tsachy Weissman
- Model Thinking, by Scott E Page
- Computer Science 101, by Nick Parlante
- Machine Learning, by Andrew Ng
- Software as a Service, by Armando Fox and David Patterson
- Natural Language Processing, by Chris Manning and Dan Jurafsky
- Game Theory, by Mathew Jackson and Yoav Shoham
- Probabilistic Graphical Models, by Daphne Koller
- Cryprography, by Dan Boneh
- Design and Analysis of Algorithms I, by Tim Roughgarden
- Computer Security, by Dan Boneh, John Mitchell and Dawn Song
- Computer Vision, by Jitendra Malik
Taking any of these courses require some considerable amount of time, suggesting about  5-10 hours a week, which can be a bit tricky to achieve if you are engaged in a 9-to-5 job, do some regular sport and have a family to take care of. If you are interested in more than one of these courses, your weekly schedule will get even tighter.
Nevertheless, I signed-up to some of them and decided to give’em a try. As an intent to help myself keep up with the courses, I’m planning to publish a series of brief posts here in this blog containing my class notes. I’ll be doing this mostly for my own consumption, so don’t expect them to be truly insightful. However, clarification comments or questions are more than welcome.