Dear Commons Community,

The NY Times has an article today describing a course on artificial intelligence that has enrolled more than 58,000 students worldwide – a class nearly four times the size of Stanford’s entire student body.  It  is one of three free courses being offered experimentally by the Stanford computer science department to extend technology knowledge and skills beyond this elite campus to the entire world.

The two instructors, Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig,  said they had been inspired by the recent work of Salman Khan, an M.I.T.-educated electrical engineer who in 2006 established a nonprofit organization to provide video tutorials to students around the world on a variety of subjects via YouTube.

“The vision is: change the world by bringing education to places that can’t be reached today,” said Dr. Thrun.

Hal Abelson, a computer scientist at M.I.T. said the Stanford course showed how rapidly the online world was evolving.

“The idea that you could put up open content at all was risky 10 years ago, and we decided to be very conservative,” he said. “Now the question is how do you move into something that is more interactive and collaborative, and we will see lots and lots of models over the next four or five years.”

We will indeed!

Tony