Peeple gettin’ more smarter onlines

Udacity opened its virtual doors to students all over the online world last year after Stanford robotics professor Sebastian Thrun saw the power and potential of free, online courses. Now, Thrun’s Stanford contemporaries, Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng, have come up with Coursera, another online university. Where Udacity decided to go rogue, and totally break from the university system, Coursera has decided to partner with different universities. Ng was a partner in Thrun’s initial experiment at Stanford, an artificial intelligence course, which Coursera will be offering. All Things D reports that, in addition to computer science courses, “it will also offer poetry, sociology, and medical courses. These classes will be graded crowdsourcing style, with peer assessment and review. Figuring out how to grade masses of assignments on a subjective scale is a machine learning problem, Ng said.” 

Class starts April 23, so if you want to attend, log in and sign up soon. No wait lists. No costs. What are you waiting for?