Διαδικτυακή Κοινότητα Φοιτητών ΕΜΠ

Dear Mavrakis Evangelos,

Happy December! We want to thank you for taking courses, participating in our community, sharing your stories, letting us know when we needed to improve, cheering us on, and making Udacity what it is today. We hope we’ve helped make your 2012 a little bit more Udacious just as you have made ours incredibly exciting and meaningful.
To ring in the coming year, we have a few start dates to announce. Mark your calendars!
Intro to Parallel Programming - Feb 4, 2012
HTML5 Game Development - Feb 4, 2013
Interactive Rendering - March 11, 2013
And with 2013 around the corner, it’s time for New Years resolutions. Lifelong learning is something that we hold close to our hearts. We want to encourage you to do the same and we’ve put together a blog post: “5 Tips to Stay Motivated Learner in 2013”. Which classes do you resolve to conquer in 2013? We'd love to hear! Join other Udacians sharing their goals at #UdacityGoals!
Another resolution on our list at Udacity is to hear more from students like you. If you’d like to help shape the future of Udacity by providing our team with feedback on how to improve the Udacity experience, please join our Feedback Program. And thanks if you’ve "liked" us on Facebook, followed us on Twitter or tweeted (#udacity) something about us -- keep it up!
Stay Udacious and see you in the New Year!

Your Udacity Team

Dear Kuchiki Byakuya,

Happy January! Here’s to a new year of learning and broadening access to education!
Pathway Towards US College Credit
To start off the New Year right, we just launched a pilot program that makes U.S. college credit possible with some MOOCs. As Sebastian Thrun announced in his blog post: “Udacity is thrilled to announce a partnership with San Jose State University to pilot three courses—Visualizing Intermediate Algebra, College Algebra, and Elementary Statistics—available online at an affordable tuition rate and for college credit. To my knowledge, this is the first time a MOOC has been offered for credit and purely online.” To see the play by play, check out our Storify page on this announcement.
These credits are accepted in the California State University system, and in the case of Statistics, in the University of California system as well. All three courses launch January 30th for the pilot period and are open for enrollment. Please note, as this is a pilot, in order to receive credit, you will have to enroll via San Jose State University first to be accepted into the pilot classes. Of course you can always take the classes for free (but not for college credit) by enrolling directly on Udacity.
ACE Partnership
On the subject of credit, we’re also working with ACE on a collaboration to explore college credit recommendations for some of our courses as well as a separate research initiative to look at impact and students served. This is all a part of wide-ranging research and evaluation effort to examine the academic potential of MOOCs and we’re pumped to be a part of it.
Good News for Intro to Parallel Programming Course
We are very excited to announce that Amazon Web Services will provide on-demand access to GPU compute instances on Amazon EC2 to qualifying students taking our Intro to Parallel Programming course. While using EC2 is not required to complete the course, it's a great option for students who want to experiment further with parallel and distributed computing on CUDA GPUs. The first 5000 students who complete Unit 1 (including assignments) will be provided with promotional credits for 15 hours of GPU instances. The first 1000 students who complete all units and assignments up through Unit 7 will be awarded promotional credits for a further 15 hours of GPU instances. This offer runs from February 4th to May 30th and some additional terms apply. Enroll in the course and you'll get all the details.
Crunchies

And last but not least, thank you for all your help in getting us nominated for a 2012 Crunchie! Now that we’re on the ballot please help us win Crunchies for Best Education Startup. One vote per person per day is allowed. Vote here! The last day to vote is January 24th. (Note, it may be confusing, but click “share” to vote.)
We’re looking forward to more exciting courses to announce soon and new learning events this year.

Be Udacious!

Your Udacity Team

Dear Koutsiki Byakuya,

Thanks for enrolling in my course, Analytic Combinatorics, Part I. I'm excited to let you know that the course will get started on February 8, 2013, and will run for five weeks. You can review the Syllabus and Schedule to see what's coming. I'll also send weekly announcements summarizing what's to happen each week.

The video is now available on the course website. It is an optional overview that tries to answer the question "What is Analytic Combinatorics" and to give some historical perspective. If you are completely new to the material, you might wish to skip this video or come back to it later on. Most of it is covered, at a much slower pace, later in the course.

The course is based on a variety of materials:

• The lecture videos and lecture slides.

• The textbook, An Introduction to the Analysis of Algorithms, 2nd edition, is our basic reference. Although the lectures are designed to be self-contained, the textbook provides thorough coverage of the material. Addison-Wesley is offering Coursera students a 35% discount when purchased from Inform IT. To receive the discount, enter the code COURSERA during checkout.

• The booksite, which is open to everyone and contains a wealth of supplementary information, including synopses of the textbook, answers to some exercises, code, and other resources.

• Selected exercises from the textbook, which are also released each week in the lecture slides, the booksite and the Coursera site. These are for self-assessment and to focus discussion in the forums.

• Optional experiments, usually introduced in the lecture slides and also released each week in the booksite and the Coursera site. Again, these are for self-assessment and to focus discussion in the forums.

To maximize your learning outcome in this course, you should get in the mindset of being an active participant who solves problems, studies the available resources, and engages in the discussion forums, as opposed to a passive participant who just watches the lectures. I don't plan any online assessments, but expect that the forums will provide some help for people who have trouble completing the assignments.

Best of luck,
RS

Analytic Combinatorics, Part I Course Staff