Now Everyone can Study Engineering at Stanford with Silverlight

Over the past few months, I have been helping a small team at Stanford's Center for Professional Development launch a site which lets people around the world attend Stanford engineering courses free-of-charge.  Built with ASP.net using Windows Media Services, the Stanford Engineering Everywhere (SEE)  site has ten full courses today with full lectures and materials.  Because of the versatility of Windows media as an easily transformable format, they are able to offer the courses in a variety of formats and on a variety of sites , but the one that I like the best is the Silverlight player.

The Silverlight player uses Windows Media Streaming and integration with Facebook for note taking.  Because the media is streamed instead of progressive download, you can quickly jump around to various parts of each lecture without downloading the whole media file first.  This is both more affordable from a bandwidth perspective - you only download what you watch and a more user-controllable experience because you immediately have random-access to the whole media stream.  Maybe I'll start learning about Robotics next...