Most people automatically associate BitTorrents with piracy, but it ain’t necessarily so. Case in point – Stanford University is offering several free online courses, available as BitTorrents, or from iTunes, YouTube, and Vyew.
The courses are:
Introduction to Computer Science
Programming Methodology CS106A
Programming Abstractions CS106B
Programming Paradigms CS107
Artificial Intelligence
Introduction to Robotics CS223A
Natural Language Processing CS224N
Machine Learning CS229
Linear Systems and Optimization
The Fourier Transform and its Applications EE261
Introduction to Linear Dynamical Systems EE263
Convex Optimization I EE364A
Convex Optimization II EE364B
As TorrentFreak reports:
- Over 200,000 people from all over the world have visited the site already.
- You get not only videos of lectures, but also syllabi, handouts, homework and exams.
- All course materials are published under a Creative Commons license
While some universities restrict the use of BitTorrent clients, others embrace the popular flilesharing protocol and use it to spread knowledge. Stanford University is one of the few to realize that BitTorrent does not equal piracy. They use BitTorrent to give away some of their engineering courses, with some success.
They do add that although they allow the use of BitTorrents, students caught using BitTorrents for piracy will be fined $100 to $1000 dollars to regain their use of the school network.
Once again, here is the link. Now study hard and make me proud!
