PALO ALTO, California - A free online course at Stanford University on artificial intelligence, to be taught this fall by two leading experts from Silicon Valley, has attracted more than 58,000 students around the globe - nearly four times the size of Stanford's student body.

The course is one of three being offered by the Stanford computer science department to extend knowledge and skills beyond this elite California campus to the world. The online students will not get grades or credit, but they will be ranked in comparison to the work of other online students and will receive a "statement of accomplishment."

For the artificial intelligence course, students may need some higher math, like linear algebra and probability theory, but there are no restrictions to online participation. So far, the age range is from high school to retirees, and the course has attracted interest from more than 175 countries.

The instructors are Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig, two of the world's leading artificial intelligence experts. In 2005 Dr. Thrun led a team of Stanford students and professors in building a robotic car that won a Pentagon-sponsored challenge by driving 212 kilometers over unpaved roads in a California desert. Dr. Norvig is a former NASA scientist who is now Google's director of research and an author.

The three online courses, which will employ both streaming Internet video and interactive technologies for quizzes, have in the past been taught to smaller groups of Stanford students in campus lecture halls.

The two additional courses will be an introductory course on database software, taught by Jennifer Widom, and an introduction to machine learning, taught by Andrew Ng.

How will the artificial intelligence instructors grade 58,000 students? The scientists said they would make extensive use of technology. "We have a system running on the Amazon cloud, so we think it will hold up," Dr. Norvig said.

In place of office hours, they will use the Google moderator service, software that will allow students to vote on the best questions for the professors to respond to in an online chat and possibly video format.

Although the courses are described as an experiment, the researchers say they expect classes to be made more widely accessible via the Internet. "I personally would like to see the equivalent of a Stanford computer science degree on the Web," Dr. Ng said.

Dr. Widom said that having Stanford courses freely available could both assist and compete with other universities.

There has also been discussion about whether making the courses freely available would be a threat to the university, which charges more than $50,000 a year in tuition.

"I'm much more interested in bringing Stanford to the world," Dr. Thrun said. "I see the developing world having colossal educational needs."

The New York Times

(China Daily 08/28/2011 page10)