Democratizing Higher Education

Last year, I have been part of the first step in the upcoming revolution of education. I took an online class on "Introduction to Artificial Intelligence" and the experience has been great. I love learning and I truly believe in the importance of higher quality education at lower cost delivered through Internet everywhere at anytime.

There are already some outstanding experiments out there:

• Khan Academy
• MIT Open Courseware

Both offer interesting lessons on a broad range of topics for free. The topics are not strictly related with computer science.

I believe that people love learning but at the same time people want to be able to add their new skills on their CV. For this reason, it is important to organise exams and give certificates. The most important thing is price: price have to be very low in order to make education available to all the people.
There is now a new exiting project that is called Udacity with exactly this purpose in mind. The classes will be free of cost and all about computer science topics (at the moment).

Classes start on 20th February 2012 but courses will be offered again starting April 16, 2012.

The most exiting thing for me is that now they have a programming environment, so you can develop and test software. This means that there will be programming problems to solve in order to pass the course.

An another upcoming project is MITx that will offer a portfolio of MIT courses through an online interactive learning platform. I am very curious to see what will happen.

We will have plenty of cool things to learn... as usual is all about prioritising and finding the time for studying.

Sebastian Thrun resigns from Stanford to Launch Udacity. I have a great respect for this man.