Stanford's free AI course

IT’S TRUE.

Stanford University is offering its CS221 Introduction to Artificial Intelligence (AI) course online to anyone who wants to take it for FREE. Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig will be teaching the online version of the course along with the in-class version at Stanford. It seems as though lectures will be via YouTube videos, and assessments will come in the form of multiple choice and fill-in-the-blank questions. (I could be wrong about the assessment format, but it doesn’t seem likely they’d ask for short or long answer from online students who aren’t paying tuition fees. Teaching assistant wages aren’t that cheap.)

The class will run from October 10, 2011 to December 16, 2011, and once you finish it, you’ll get a letter from the professors telling you how you did. You won’t be handed a Stanford certificate, unless you’re actually enrolled as a student at Stanford.

Enrollment hasn’t started yet, but you can sign up to be notified about when the enrollment does start.

Even though I know I’ll be up to my eyes in actual course work this year, and I know that the comic above may be a very accurate prediction of my future if I do take the AI course… I’m still kind of interested in enrolling. It’s free. It’s from Stanford. It’s about Artificial Intelligence.

I wonder if this course has a drop date.