Tag Archives: study

The internet’s offering of information is nearly unlimited, but this is not always a good thing. Many people get lost with this overflow of information and don’t manage to recognise good qualities information from bad ones. Hopefully we have Google which never stop improving their search engine and Wikipedia who provide answers to most questions we have in mind. These two websites revolutionise the world, more precisely the access to information.

This post is about a new kind of information revolution. This post is about the democratisation of university level courses provided for everyone and for free.

This revolution gently started in October 2011 when the two most famous teachers in AI start an online course program. To a huge surprise more than 160’000 students registered for this course. There were children, single parents, PhDs… People from all around the world were following the course. I know that because I was one of them. This was an incredible experience, so many views and ideas were sharing in a respective and productive environment.

After the big success of this course and two other ones launched at the same time, an incredible thing happened: Many teachers from different universities started to propose similar free online courses.

And I am not talking about slides and exercises put online but real courses with lectures taught by world-class professors who work in universities like MIT, Stanford, Princeton, Berkeley and so on.

Lessons are presented as interactive videos with quizzes, there are also exercises, exams, active communities, slides, etc. Even if there are thousands of students, by a voting system student can vote for most interesting questions and teachers will answer them on YouTube.

Every course is free and for everyone.

Here is a listing of courses I have found.