[juanre]

For those of us with kids and without access to a world-class university this is huge news. I had to study in Spain. Becoming and engineer here was difficult, but the difficulty laid not in the things we had to learn, but in the hoops they made you jump through. With a few exceptions ---there are some great teachers here too-- it was more survival training than a learning experience. Later, when working for HP, I had the opportunity to take Stanford graduate courses. The quality of the teaching was mind-boggling. How lucky these guys are, I kept thinking. Such opportunity!

Of course I jumped at the chance of taking the first AI class, eager to see if it would go towards the (possibly hugely profitable) world-wide higher education framework I was hoping we'd manage to build. I was disappointed by the certificate at the end only mentioning Stanford to make sure that we didn't think this was associated with them in any way. They were clearly not getting it.

But Sebastian Thrun was, and I think Anant Agarwal at MIT is as well. The extremely high teaching standards they have already shown: add a way to give trusted certificates, and this could be the way out for millions of kids throughout the world. And, I assure you, people everywhere _will_ pay for a paper from a trusted source that shows the degree of excellence they or their kids have achieved.