Two free courses from Udacity

From Want to program a self-driving car? Stanford’s AI guru says he can teach you in seven weeks
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"After leading Stanford’s robotic car effort to first and second place finishes in the DARPA [1] challenge, and launching the now famous Chauffeur project at Google, Sebastian Thrun broke more new ground by teaching a Stanford computer science course online to 160,000 students last fall. After his invitation for anyone, worldwide, to audit the course went viral, registrations went through the roof.

Inspired by the class’s success (248 students achieved perfect scores — none of them enrolled at Stanford), Sebastian has taken online education to the next level, starting a free online “university” named Udacity, through his startup, Know Labs. For now, Udacity only has two classes, but they are both likely to be very popular.

The first is a basic programming class, Computer Science 101, “Building a Search Engine”, which aims to teach anyone eager enough to do the work how to program a search engine in just seven weeks. I wouldn’t count on displacing Google right after finishing, but knowing Thrun, he is quite capable of imparting an amazing amount of knowledge in a short time.
The second — probably more interesting to the many of our readers who already know a lot about programming — is Computer Science 373, “Programming a Robotic Car,” which aims to teach you to do just that [2], also in seven weeks. It is likely to be a real eye-opener, and quite a lot of fun, but please don’t take your final project out on the street near my house!"
Discussion by Felix Salmon in the post Udacity and the future of online universities