Coursera to feature popular Princeton computer science courses

Princeton’s already enor­mously pop­u­lar intro­duc­tory com­puter sci­ence classes soon will be avail­able on the new online learn­ing plat­form Cours­era. The first, on algo­rithms, cre­ated by Robert Sedgewick and jointly devel­oped over the past decade by Sedgewick and his col­league Kevin Wayne, will be online late in the summer.

Sedgewick tells EQN that while it will be fab­u­lous to have videos of his lec­tures online as part of Cours­era, the courses already have a huge reach thanks to inno­v­a­tive course-related web­sites that Wayne and he have been devel­op­ing for years.

More than half of all Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity under­grad­u­ates, regard­less of major, take one of Sedgewick and Wayne’s com­puter sci­ence courses. More­over their Prince­ton course web­sites already have a global reach: in 2011, they had 1.5 mil­lion unique vis­i­tors from across the world.

The algo­rithms course is based on a series of books by Sedgewick that have been best­sellers for decades (the most recent edi­tion coau­thored with Kevin Wayne). A sec­ond  Sedgewick course, “Ana­lytic Com­bi­na­torics,” based on the sem­i­nal text­book on the sub­ject writ­ten by Philippe Fla­jo­let and Sedgewick, will be offered in Spring 2013.

Sedgewick’s Algo­rithms text­books have had wide influ­ence on the teach­ing of com­puter sci­ence since the first edi­tion was pub­lished in 1983. They are char­ac­ter­ized by ele­gant imple­men­ta­tions in real pro­gram­ming lan­guages and demon­strate at the same time a wide range of real-world appli­ca­tions in graph­ics, ani­ma­tion and dif­fer­ent sci­en­tific disciplines.

While non-Princeton stu­dents will ben­e­fit from free online access to these world-class com­puter sci­ence courses, Prince­ton stu­dents also will profit from the Cours­era rela­tion­ship, Sedgewick says.

“This will lead to more and bet­ter web con­tent, improv­ing what Prince­ton stu­dents already use,” he said. “It will pro­vide exten­sive and pow­er­ful tools for their pre­cep­tors, who will then have more time for per­sonal inter­ac­tion with students.”

This fall Cours­era also will be fea­tur­ing a course on com­puter archi­tec­ture by elec­tri­cal engi­neer­ing assis­tant pro­fes­sor David Went­zlaff.