Michael Jacobsen

Author: Michael Jacobsen Date: 2012-04-09 Updated: 2013-01-08 Title: Online courses Tags: lists Category: lists

The Khan Academy (link) was a pioneer in online learning. However, online learning really picked up speed in 2011 when a number of Stanford professors started a number of freely available online classes. I see it as a possibility to learn stuff in a structured way as a side project next to work. As I participate in courses I will add them to the following list with some remarks about my impression.

  • Artificial Intelligence taught by Peter Norvig and Sebastian Thrun. Provided a nice overview and details about a variety of artificial intelligence algorithms.

  • Logic (Coursera) taught by Mike Genesereth. The course was somewhat dry with a single excursion into a box-lab. Provided a refresher about logic.

  • Software as a Service (Coursera - now EdX) taught by Armando Fox and David Paterson. This course was somewhat a disappointment. I had hoped for less Ruby and more Saas.

  • Automata (Coursera) taught by Jeffrey Ullman. This course took my back to the days of university. Liked the course.

  • Game Theory (Coursera) taught by Matthew O. Jackson and Yoav Shoham. Gave me a good introduction to the field of game theory. The course was one of the more challenging of the ones I have followed.

  • Model Thinking (Coursera) taught by Scott E. Page. This is course that I have had the best experience with so far. The subjects were interesting and the level were perfect for me.

  • Cryptography (Coursera) taught by Dan Boneh. Had a very academic approach and it was quite hard to follow.

  • Design of Computer Programs (Udacity) taught by Peter Norvig. As with Artificial Intelligence Peter Norvig showed how good a communicator he is. Presented a range of techniques to solve various problems.

  • Statistics (Coursera) taught by Andrew Conway. Gave an overview of basic statistical subjects and how to use the software package R to compute those.

  • Foundations of Computer Graphics (EdX) taught by Ravi Ramamoorthi. Provided an introduction to OpenGL programming and ray tracing. The OpenGL part was fairly straight forward. However, the ray tracing assignment was both challenging and fun.