Interesting Snippets

Thrun told the story of his Introduction to Artificial Intelligence class, which ran from October to December last year. It started as a way of putting his Stanford course online — he was going to teach the whole thing, for free, to anybody in the world who wanted it. With quizzes and grades and a final certificate, in parallel with the in-person course he was giving his Stanford undergrad students. He sent out one email to announce the class, and from that one email there was ultimately an enrollment of 160,000 students…. there were more students in his course from Lithuania alone than there are students at Stanford altogether. There were students in Afghanistan… when it finished, thousands of students around the world were educated and inspired. Some 248 of them, in total, got a perfect score… All 248 took the course online; not one was enrolled at Stanford.
… the physical class at Stanford dwindled from 200 students to 30 students because the online course was more intimate and better at teaching than the real-world course on which it was based.