Our very own Phil introduced us to this article after ‘attending’ the free online Artificial Intelligence course that was organised as an experiment by Professor Sebastian Thrun at Stanford University.

This course was originally going to be taught in parallel with the actual course at Stanford, but the online version was so successful (it amassed a whopping 160,000 people around the world) that most of the 200 students taking the physical course joined the online course too.

Thrun has now decided that he's not going to teach at Stanford anymore and set-up Udacity, on which he hopes to enroll 600,000+ students (for free) on his first course which is an intro to CS, where students will build their own search engine.

He is joining the likes of the Khan academy in what looks to us like a revolution in low-cost, globally relevant online education services.