An Introduction to Coursera

Coursera (http://www.coursera.org/) is a start-up company founded by a Stanford professor named Andrew Ng. Those in the field of machine learning surely have heard of this big name. But for other students who are simply interested in computer science and many other fields, hoping to enjoy free online education from prestigious universities in the United States, this introduction will definitely be useful for you.

From my own perspective, this revolutionary evolution in online courses offering shows a great trend - that knowledge is becoming accessible to everyone in the world, just as what the frontiers of wikipedia (http://www.wikipedia.org/) have been trying to do. I myself have accomplished Prof. Andrew Ng's machine learning course in Coursera, and I think it was a great journey. I will be taking Probabilistic Graphical Models and Natural Language Processing courses this semester, and I shall be updating my progress in my blog too.

Coursera offers courses in computer science and many other fields like biology, economics, social science and mathematics. And it's rapidly increasing its entries of courses. In each course, there will be a set of video lectures posted every week, and some quizzes and programming assignments or group projects. Grading will depend on enrolled students' score in those tasks and exams. After the courses end, students shall receive their statement of accomplishment according to their performance.

To sum up, I think it's greatly beneficial to take the courses. I give it a strong recommendation.