The internet is a disruptive technology that takes existing heirarchies and squishes, pounds and generally beats them into something new. Take for instance the press where traditional paper media is looking more anachronistic by the second and is set to be replaced by something which we're not really quite sure what it is yet.
The same process has hardly started in higher education but the more you think about it the generation that grew up learning everything online is going to find it weird to pay some institution £9,000 a year to set in a lecture hall when you can learn the same stuff online for free or alot less. University will still be a central feature of many people's lives as the desire to move out of home is a great one for many teenagers but for learning increasingly people are going to do that on the net.
Step forward Peter Norvig and Sebastian Thrun with their Introduction to Artificial Intelligence class which is the online version of the introduction to artificial intelligence class they run at Stanford. While the students there have to get dressed to learn stuff people who learn online can stay in our underpants while the we feast our minds on the same brainfood.
No this wont get you a Stanford degree but the Jeffery Archer's of the future will sure be putting STANFORD in as bigger letters as their CV's can cope with safe in the knowledge they avoided the earthquake risk of visiting California before the big one strikes. You also get to compete with the people who do go to Stanford. For people whose access to HE is restricted this is a great opportunity which should be extended as far as possible. Elites will be made more porous. Society will be less bound by results in examinations at the age of 18 that people really don't care about just a few years later. This is to cut a long story short a good thing.
So if you want to learn about all the interesting things that make up the field of artifical intelligence then why not sign up? It's free afterall.
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