Device Guru reports that Stanford has offered up 10 free courses under the title of “Stanford Engineering Everywhere.” The courses are licensed under CC-BY-NC-SA 3.0 Unported.
Course participants do not register, and have no direct contact with Stanford instructors or professors. They do, however, have the ability to communicate online with other SEE students. A detailed SEE FAQ is available here.
The University says SEE’s initial courses include “one of Stanford’s most popular engineering sequences: the three-course Introduction to Computer Science taken by the majority of Stanford undergraduates, and seven more advanced courses in artificial intelligence and electrical engineering.”
The license under which the courses are being released is the Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. According to the University, this license stipulates that “original content [can] be the remixed, tweaked, and built into new non-commercial content as long as the original source is credited and the new creations are distributed under the identical terms.”
As noted, the courses are nearly identical to the ones offered to Stanford’s registered students. However, some content has been omitted in cases where a copyright holder’s consent could not be obtained for releasing the material under the Creative Commons license. There are also “a few other exceptions,” according to the University.
I would have preferred a freer license, but this is certainly a huge step forward. Let’s hope more universities follow suit.