Stanford University Awards "Statement of Accomplishment" for Free Online Course. (February 6, 2012)

Online Introduction to Artificial Intelligence is based on Stanford CS221, Introduction to Artificial Intelligence. This class introduces students to the basics of Artificial Intelligence, which includes machine learning, probabilistic reasoning, robotics, and natural language processing.

So says the opening sentence at  https://www.ai-class.com/overview the course given by Professor Sebastian Thrun, an expert in robotics and a vice president at Google, together with Peter Norvig, Google's director of research.

The course is described as an undergraduate- or early graduate-level course that requires around 10 hours a week, has weekly assignments, a mid‑term and a final exam. In order to receive a "statement of accomplishment", students have to take both exams. According to Professor Thrun the course had 160,000 sign-ups (nearly 100,000 of whom were on the advanced track), 46,000 submitters of the first homework, 23,000 submitters of the mid-term exam, and 20,000 who completed the final exam.

To gain an understanding of what Professor Thrun is promulgating you've got to go to:

http://new.livestream.com/channels/556/videos/112950

Endure or skip the 2'20" introduction.  Sebastian Thrun is a remarkable guy and a remarkable teacher.

It is Professor Thrun's decision not to teach by lecture at Stanford again and instead to concentrate his efforts on a private venture-capital funded initiative called Udacity, whose online courses will be free. Udacity aims to enrol 500,000 students on its first two courses: CS101- Building a search engine; CS373 - Programming a robotic car.

UDACITY is at    http://www.udacity.com/