Stanford University will offer a free, online course on artificial intelligence this fall, and more than 58,000 people worldwide have already registered for the course, which is about a 326-percent increase over the on-campus enrollment for Introduction to Artificial Intelligence last fall.

Students will not receive Stanford credit, but will get a “statement of accomplishment” and see how they rank in comparison to the other students.

The course will use both streaming Internet video and interactive quizzes and assignments, and the grading system will operate from Amazon’s cloud service. Instead of office hours, the class will use Google’s moderator service, which will allow students to vote on what questions the professors should answer.

Peter Norving, a former NASA scientist and now Google’s research director, will co-teach the class with Sebastian Thrun, who once led a secret Google project to develop robotic vehicles and won a 2005 Pentagon-sponsored contest to develop a robotic car.

For now though, the two men will concentrate on personalizing exams to limit cheating.

Read more at The New York Times ^[1].