About Stanford's new coursework

[IlyaKEightSix]

So as some of you may know, Stanford put up three online courses: Machine Learning, AI, and databases. I'm taking all three. Technically, these courses do fall under education. So would it be disingenuous to put them on my resume under education?

Currently, I have them labeled as "Coursework", and I suppose savvy recruiters would know that these courses are online ones, but in the event they don't, would this constitute as embellishing/lying/otherwise being dishonest?

 

[KaiRu]

"If you know something, just say you know it, and then be prepared to answer questions about it during your phone screens and/or interviews. " (c) Steve Yegg. Ten Tips for a (Slightly) Less Awful Resume

 

[DominiConnor]

Now, that's a very good question.

There are N issues:

Firstly, my olderson has enrolled in the AI course, but that is not the same as saying he went to Stanford, in particular it means all he had to do was lie on the application form since apparently it did not occur to them that a 10 year old would take the course. Care must be taken that you do not claim to have been admitted to Stanford as a full student.

Secondly, it is unlikely in the extreme that a given recruiter knows about these online courses, so you should apply extra care to make sure you're not accidentally thought to be misrepresenting yourself.

Lastly as KaiRu says, absolutely anything you put on your CV is a valid source of questions, so if you put something that says you've done a decent AI/ML/DB course expect to get at least graduate level questions on that topic.

 

[IlyaKEightSix]

I see. What I think is the center of the issue is that computer systems look at your schooling, and are probably not updated for Stanford's new experiment in providing a top-quality education to the masses out there, considering that this goes above and beyond MIT's OCW in that I am actually legitimately doing assignments for these courses in order to learn the material. However, I'm not (despite the fact that I wish I was in hindsight) a Stanford student.

Would it be sufficient to put on my cover letter that I am currently taking Stanford's online coursework, or do I explicitly have to state "I NEVER WAS A STANFORD STUDENT"? After all, if I have those three free courses on my CV (and do the work), I still want to retain some of the branding power that "hey, I took Stanford courses taught by real Stanford professors, and actually *did* the work". So in a way, I want to represent the fact that I'm smart enough to handle Stanford coursework, at least insofar as described by Peter Norvig in that the advanced track assignments will be equivalent to that of what is expected of Stanford students themselves. At the same time, I don't want to be seen as misrepresenting.

In other words, how do I have my cake and eat it too?

 

[Andy Nguyen]

If just thinking about it gives you pause, don't do it. And I don't believe the Stanford courses are fundamentally different from MIT OCW. Stanford can spend resources on these 3 courses and benefits from huge publicity while MIT has been doing it for years with hundreds courses.
You can do all the class assignments for OCW courses just like MIT students do. So you should treat these just as putting MIT OCW on your resume.

 

[Dcai]

I think there are some differences between Stanford and OCW courses.
The 3 online courses offered by Stanford seem to be very organized. I received emails from them regarding which videos i need to finish by the end of the week. There are deadline on quiz and assignments, and the forum is pretty active.

 

[DMX]

agree with andy - don't see anything wrong with putting it under courseworks section but putting the stanford name in the education section seems a bit disingenuous.