An Ivy League-caliber online education is right at your fingertips, and it costs you nothing.
Nothing. Nada. Zilch.
Coursera offers online educational courses for free. Coursera, like an interactive YouTube system, chops online video courses into 10-minute nuggets and quizzes the viewer on each segment. The honor code is used to grade term papers, students must honestly assess each other’s work — and there are no checks and balances for cheating.
At the completion of the coursework, students will receive a certificate of completion, as opposed to actual college credit.
“The best way to change education was to use the technology we have developed during the past three years,” says Stanford University Associate Professor Andrew Ng, one of the developers of the online learning platform.
Dr. Ng’s course in Machine Technology began this week. Students will “learn about the most effective machine learning techniques, and gain practice implementing them and getting them to work for yourself,” according to the course description.
www.coursera.org/course/ml
Check out these five free online courses.
1. Princeton: Introduction to Sociology.
Princeton University offers the Introduction to Sociology class, that promises to cover “the essentials of sociology, to help you better understand your own life and situations far from your experience.”
