Emma Brunskill's course covers tabular RL, deep Q-learning, policy gradients, exploration, offline RL, and RLHF with public lecture slides and assignments. A strong theory-plus-practice sequel to David Silver's lectures.
Who it's for
Advanced learners with ML and probability. This is an advanced course in Reinforcement Learning & Robotics, running about 10 weeks (one quarter).
Cost at a glance
Free. Prior-year lecture videos (e.g., Winter 2019 and 2024) are public on Stanford Online's YouTube channel; slides and assignments are public.
Compare the alternatives
Premium alternative
Udacity · $249/mo
More in Reinforcement Learning & Robotics
Sergey Levine's graduate course goes deep on policy gradients, actor-critic, model-based RL, offline RL, exploration, and inverse RL with PyTorch homework. For learners aiming at RL research or robotics who want the most advanced free syllabus available.
advanced
One semester (~25 lectures)
Train agents from Q-learning to PPO and multi-agent setups in Colab, publish them to the Hub, and compete on leaderboards. Ideal for learners who want deep RL to be practical and fun from the first unit, with a free certificate at the end.
intermediate
8 units plus bonus units, self-paced
Certificate
UCL / Google DeepMind (David Silver)·UCL / Google DeepMind
Free
David Silver's classic lectures cover MDPs, dynamic programming, Monte Carlo and TD learning, function approximation, policy gradients, and planning, closely tracking the Sutton and Barto textbook. Still the standard first RL course for anyone serious about the field.
intermediate
10 lectures, ~1.5 hours each