Udacity is an effort from Stanford to offer free online university-level classes. There are many other similar efforts out there, termed MOOCs (massive open online course). They have a class called CS373 – Programming a robotic car, which is surprisingly relevant to neuroscience. Basically the goal of the course is to show how to program closed-loop dynamical systems. Topics covered include:

• Bayesian stats
• Monte Carlo methods
• Kalman filters
• Particle filters
• A* algorithm

This is of course very relevant to researchers interested in encoding and decoding dynamic information, for example to learn about decoding place cell information or motor cortex. All the programming exercises are done in Python. Plus, you’ll know how to program a freakin’ self-driving car. I signed up, and so should you!

Here’s a couple more potential interesting online classes that I found:

• Probabilistic Graphical Models
• Computer vision
• Machine learning
• Natural language processing
• Intro to Genomics