Stanford University was founded back in 1885 by Leland and Jane Stanford. While their journey wasn’t easy and the university had to overcome some financial issues, it’s currently one of the most desired universities in the world.
There are 83 Nobel laureates, 28 Turning Award laureates and 8 Fields Medalists among the university’s students, alumni, faculty and staff. You probably imagine why so many people want to join their ranks.
Stanford has seven schools, including the Graduate School of Business, School of Earth, Energy and Environmental Sciences, School of Education, School of Engineering, School of Humanities & Sciences, Law School, and School of Medicine. As of September 2019, there were 47,498 applicants, however, only 2,062 of them were admitted.
While only a small percentage of students manage to get in Stanford University, it doesn’t mean that you don’t have an opportunity to learn from the very best experts that teach at this university.
There are hundreds of Stanford online courses, both free and paid, that you can learn anywhere and anytime without spending a fortune or spending nothing at all... So, why not take advantage of this opportunity and improve your knowledge? You’ll find some of the best Stanford University courses on Coursera, edX, Udacity, and many other reliable online learning platforms.
Now, to provide you with the best Stanford online courses, I performed thorough research and analysis, and filtered TOP 7 options to pick from. Here’s the full list (Stanford free online courses included):
- Machine Learning
- Algorithms
- Statistical Learning
- Introduction to Food and Health
- AI in Healthcare
- Computer Science 101
- Artificial Intelligence for Robotics
Without further ado, let me introduce you to each of the courses on this list and help you to make a choice.
Table of Contents
- 1. Best Stanford Online Courses: TOP 7 Options
- 1.1. Machine Learning Course
- 1.2. Algorithms Specialization
- 1.3. Statistical Learning Course
- 1.4. Introduction to Food and Health Course
- 1.5. AI in Healthcare Specialization Courses
- 1.6. Computer Science 101 Course
- 1.7. Artificial Intelligence for Robotics Course
- 2. Conclusions
Best Stanford Online Courses: TOP 7 Options
Machine Learning Course
- Ability to learn for free: YES.
- Certificate: $79 USD.
- Time to complete: ~60 hours.
If you’re into machine learning, I bet that you’re aware of Coursera’s Machine Learning course - 97% of students evaluated this course positively. The instructor of this course, Andrew Ng is an Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University.
Interesting fact: this machine learning course created by Andrew Ng led to the founding of Coursera!
Coursera’s Machine Learning course will teach you how to get computers to act without the need for programming knowledge. Many of you are probably unaware, however, you might be using machine learning more than dozens of times per day.
Effective web search, practical speech recognition, self-driving cars - they’re all part of machine learning. This Stanford Machine Learning course will teach you the most effective machine learning techniques as well as practice implementing them. Needless to say, you’ll get not only theoretical knowledge but will also gain practical know-how.
Moreover, you’ll be introduced to machine learning, statistical pattern recognition, and datamining. The topics include supervised learning, unsupervised learning and the best practices that are used in machine learning. The skills that you’ll gain include:
- Logistic regression
- Artificial neural network
- Machine learning (ML) algorithms
- Machine learning
Needless to say, if you’re looking for the best Stanford University online courses, you should definitely consider the Machine Learning course. After all, you can enroll completely free!
Algorithms Specialization
- Ability to learn for free: 7 days.
- Time to complete: ~4 months.
Coursera’s Algorithms specialization is completely different from the previously-discussed course. This course (or specialization) is much more comprehensive, it will take you about 4 months to complete when learning 7 hours per week.
This specialization is presented by Tim Roughgarden, the Professor of Computer Science and Management Science and Engineering at Stanford University. Based on Stanford online courses reviews, students are really happy with the quality of the courses and the lecturer.
The Algorithms specialization consists of multiple courses that will help you to master the skill. This specialization is created for those who have at least minimal programming knowledge.
This course is intense, however, it will reveal the big picture and abstract understanding over low-level implementation and mathematical details. After this course, you’ll have enough knowledge to speak about algorithms with other specialists.
The Algorithm Specialization is for you if you have at least minimal programming knowledge and want hands-on experience. You will learn the fundamentals of algorithms through different types of assessments, including quizzes, assignments and a multiple-choice final exam.
After completing this course, you will gain such skills:
- Algorithms
- Dynamic programming
- Greedy algorithm
- Divide and conquer algorithms
- Randomized algorithm
- Sorting algorithm
- Graphs
- etc.
Do not hesitate and try it out. The first 7 days are completely free!
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- Ability to learn for free: YES.
- Certificate: $50 USD.
- Time to complete: ~9 weeks.
This course is introductory-level, meaning that you don’t need to have any prior knowledge. Statistical Learning course on edX will introduce you to the main tools that are normally used in statistical modeling and data science. The reason why so many students evaluate it as one of the best Stanford online courses is because it takes advantage of new methods, and shows how you can apply them in R.
When learning, you’ll have two instructors: Trevor Hastie and Robert Tibshirani. Trevor Hastie is a professor of Statistics and Biomedical Data Sciences at Stanford University. Robert Tibshirani is a professor of Biomedical Data Science and Statistics at Stanford University. Needless to say that both of them are professionals and will teach you valuable skills.
The course on Statistical Learning aims to explain to students every topic without focusing on complex mathematics. All computing is done in R, however, as I mentioned previously, you do not need to have any prior knowledge, there will be special lessons that will help you to understand R as much as needed.
After completing this course, you’ll understand:
- Classification
- Linear regression
- Resampling methods
- Linear model selection and regularization
- Moving beyond linearity
- etc.
Since you can enroll in this course completely free, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t check it out. After all, it’s one of the best Stanford free online courses.
Introduction to Food and Health Course
- Ability to learn for free: YES.
- Certificate: $39 USD.
- Time to complete: ~7 hours.
If you’re looking for the best Stanford online courses that won’t take you weeks or even months to complete, this is the option for you. The Introduction to Food and Health course requires no previous knowledge and is created for everyone who wants to find out more about health and nutrition as well as improve their well-being.
The instructor of this course is Maya Adam who has been teaching at Stanford University since 2009. She received a BA in Human Biology at Stanford and later completed a medical degree at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.
At the moment, Maya Adam is creating online content for physicians, medical students and anyone else who’s interested in acquiring knowledge in this field.
At the end of this course, you’ll be aware of the foods that are good for your health as well as those that can do more harm. What is more, you will get some practical tips on simple home cooking that will make your daily life easier.
You can enroll in this course for free, however, if you want to receive a certificate, it will cost you $39. The sum is pretty fair, to say the least.
The skills that you will gain after completing this course include:
- Health informatics
- Nutrition
- Food safety
- Food science
Do not hesitate and try it out!
AI in Healthcare Specialization Courses
- Ability to learn for free: 7 days.
- Time to complete: ~8 months.
AI can potentially change the field of healthcare. If there would be an ability to analyze all the data of patients’ visits to the clinic, prescribed medications, lab test results, procedures that were appointed to a specific patient as well as all the other information unrelated to visits to the clinic - social media, purchased that were made, internet search activity, etc., AI could make a more accurate diagnosis and improve patients’ care.
Just like the specialization on algorithms that I introduced to you previously in this article on the best Stanford online courses, AI in Healthcare is not a regular course that you can complete in a few hours.
It should take you about 8 months to finish it and receive a certificate that you can later share with your current or future employer and get a promotion or better job offer!
This specialization includes current and future applications of AI in the healthcare system. It’s created for both computer science professionals and healthcare providers, however, since it doesn’t require any previous knowledge, anyone can take this course. Many people evaluate it as one of the best Stanford online courses.
This course will provide you not only with theoretical but also practical knowledge, meaning that you’ll get hands-on experience on following a patient's journey using a unique dataset that was created specifically for this.
After completing AI in Healthcare Specialization, you’ll be able to:
- Identify the issues that health providers are facing every day and machine learning could assist in solving
- Analyze how AI affects patient care, including safety, quality and research.
- Apply AI to practice and business of medicine
- Apply AI building blocks in order to innovate and understand emerging technologies
Do not hesitate and enroll in one of the best Stanford University courses right now!
Computer Science 101 Course
- Ability to learn for free: YES.
- Certificate: $149 USD.
- Time to complete: ~6 weeks.
When looking for the best Stanford University online courses, you’ll definitely come across Computer Science 101 course. This course will introduce everyone to computer science, doesn’t matter if you have any previous knowledge or not.
If you’re a busy person you should be aware that this is a self-paced course, so you don’t have to worry about finishing it on time. Whether it will take you 2 or 4 months, there’s no difference.
What’s also great about this course is that you won’t need to download any programs, everything will work perfectly within the browser. That being said if you want to gain more knowledge in computer science, this is an option for you.
The reason why people consider it one of the best Stanford online courses is because of all the skills and knowledge you gain:
- Understanding the nature of computers and coding
- Be aware of computer hardware and understand how it works
- Understand all the necessary terms: bits, bytes, etc.
- Understand how the software works
- etc.
This course is an introductory level, so you don’t need any previous knowledge to enroll.
- Easy to use with a learn-by-doing approach
- Offers quality content
- Gamified in-browser coding experience
- Free certificates of completion
- Focused on data science skills
- Flexible learning timetable
- Simplistic design (no unnecessary information)
- High-quality courses (even the free ones)
- Variety of features
- Nanodegree programs
- Suitable for enterprises
- Paid certificates of completion
- Huge variety of courses
- Easy to navigate
- No technical issues
- Huge variety of courses
- 30-day refund policy
- Free certificates of completion
Artificial Intelligence for Robotics Course
- Ability to learn for free: YES.
- Certificate: NO.
- Time to complete: ~2 months.
If you’re looking for Stanford free online courses, this is your chance! The Artificial Intelligence for Robotics course that you can learn at Udacity should take about 2 months to complete.
This course will teach you the programming of all the main systems of a robotic car. You’ll be learning from the leader of Google and Stanford autonomous driving teams. The only aspect to take into consideration is that it’s not suitable for complete beginners and is created for advanced users. However, this doesn’t change the fact that it’s one of the most recommended Stanford online courses for those in the field.
After completing this course, you’ll understand:
- Basic methods used in artificial intelligence
- How to apply AI methods in building self-driving cars
While there are slightly better-evaluated Stanford online courses, this one is definitely worthy of your attention.
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Conclusions
Therefore, as promised, I introduced you to the top 7 Stanford online courses What’s interesting is that not all of them are based on IT, machine learning or AI, there are courses that teach you soft skills as well as help to understand more about healthy living.
That being said, if you’re looking for the very best Stanford University online courses, do not hesitate and pick at least one from the list:
- Machine Learning
- Algorithms
- Statistical Learning
- Introduction to Food and Health
- AI in Healthcare
- Computer Science 101
- Artificial Intelligence for Robotics
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