Sebastian Thrun Steps Down as Udacity's CEO
fortune.com
fortune.com
This is not obviously a bad idea: the quality of teaching at Harvard or Stanford is probably better than that you obtain in most universities, but the one of the main added values are the network of people you meet, and the credential of having attended a very prestigious university.
However: the kind of person that takes a lot of online courses is probably already an educated professional, and for her, the main added value is the joy of learning new things, and the credentials themselves are near worthless.
I'm sure they have lots of very smart people who thought hard about how to best monetize their offerings, but, for me, I would definitely pay a flat fee per month just to be able to keep sampling every course I want.
Usually, you have to back it up with real-world projects. In which case why would I pay for the degree, I should just go out and build something with the stuff I learn for free.
Sure, the organization can attempt to explain and promote how its credential provides evidence of X, Y, Z skills or knowledge. Which works reasonably for both well-established institutions and narrow vocational training (including in IT). But it's a lot harder to make a case that random MOOC course provides evidence of much other than a generalized interest in continuing education (for which you don't really need a credential to prove).
While I never signed up for the nanodegree track, it appears those are similar.
> "Completion of a data science certificate program (online or other) may replace 1 year of relevant experience. Some examples of data science certificate programs include those offered by Cloudera, Coursera, Indiana University-Bloomington, and University of California-Irvine."
Data Scientist - Entry Level: https://www.nsa.gov/psp/applyonline/EMPLOYEE/HRMS/c/HRS_HRAM...
Data Scientist: https://www.nsa.gov/psp/applyonline/EMPLOYEE/HRMS/c/HRS_HRAM...
Might just be an indication of how desperate they are for those positions, but it could also indicate they're doing a pretty good job educating people.
The course content (videos, slides) presents some basics with a large emphasis on having a "hacker ethos" to do more work and digging on your own to be successful. The quizzes and projects in the R course demanded the use of techniques that were outside of the content provided in the lecture. I am not against having a hacker ethos and personally am happy to research and learn on my own, but I fail to see the logic in charging money to tell people to Google. I expect a curriculum to be a self-contained unit of learning, or else I wouldn't bother with curriculum.
Contrast this to Coursera's excellent (and free) Rice University Interactive Python Programming classes that are really superb. The Rice University team put together an online Python interpreter complete with graphics capability so that students could test each other's code. The R class left peer review of students' code as "do not run the code, eyeball it and see if it looks right". I understand why they did it (execution of potentially harmful code), but Rice's solution was elegant.
I'm about halfway through the JHU Data Science program and I agree that there's a fair amount of "extra" work you have to do. But still, coming into it as somebody who had never used R at all before, I've learned a ton and have definitely found it to be worth the money I've spent (I plan to actually do the entire track and get the certificate and everything).
Now that said, I probably woulnd't pay much more than what they're charging now (I think most of these classes have been $49.00 / class so far), but at that rate, I definitely feel that it's been worthwhile. And even if it isn't a formal degree, it still gives me the ability to legitimately mention JHU on my resume. So if somebody is just quick skimming my resume to make a decision on which pile to sort it into, that probably gives mine a small nudge in favor of the "look deeper" pile.
If it were possible for a good student at _any_ school to take online courses _for credit_ at an Ivy, and perhaps to even work toward a new "dual" degree that joins both institutions, I suspect the demand would be there. They're already using borrowed money.
I took some great courses on Udacity, Coursera, and edX back in the days when they regularly offered amazing comprehensive college courses for free.
They do still offer free courses. However, it seems that the atmosphere of free accessible education is somehow lost, with the advent of the "specializations" and "nanodegrees" and the like. Or maybe I just got older and more cynical, I'm not sure.
That being said, there's an amazing wealth of knowledge on the internet completely free to consume not locked behind any particular walled garden awaiting those who dare step out of their comfort zones of consumption/absorption, but its not nicely packaged in the latest fad de jour… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Even if you plan on being an entrepreneur, your first media coverage is either going to say 'the Harvard graduate' or 'the self taught .. '. So it's an indicator even then. For Apple and Microsoft, 'college dropout' featured in nearly every early article. It became something of a compliment after a bit though and helped them stand out somehow. Nothing is ever simple, but just being accepted is probably enough even if you don't finish.
> 'college dropout' featured in nearly every early article. It became something of a compliment after a bit though and helped them stand out somehow.
'Standing out' is irrelevant in this context unless your business is entirely based on you being a famous figure in the press. Gates and Jobs are famous because of the incredible companies they built, not the other way around. The press needed to paint a story, so they went with the college dropout narrative. However their success, and the success of every company/founder is entirely independent of founder social validation.
We're definitely in the minority, but some of us in hiring positions actively discriminate against the didn't-learn-until-college demographic for software developers.
Of course there's nothing wrong with an early interest in computers and programming. However, "actively discriminating" as you put it has the effect of effectively selecting for males from a background that enables an early interest in computers.
It might have been a different story if they announced from the beginning that they are only offering their services for free for a certain period of time. They focused on gaining users and they succeeded on that, but now that they are focused on making money they seem to lose users.
It's natural that you are losing users once you start asking for money, it's just impossible to have it otherwise. Let's not forget that Coursera is a business so they obviously need to generate some revenue, sooner or later. What they did seems like a sensible business decision to me. They focused and succeeded with the marketing and branding initially (Coursera became almost synonymous with online courses) and they are collecting the revenue from it now.
Charge for it but don't try and fool me with "I am nice and doing good" talk.
I don't think that's true. People don't seem to feel that entitled in the "analog" world. But the digital technology changes the equation, and frankly, I think our "lizard brain" is right on this one.
The marginal cost of producing another copy of digitally encoded product is essentially zero, and it requires zero specialist knowledge. Copying binary data is what computers are made for, it's their basic function. Plus, the Internet lets you scale a digital business to the whole world for (almost) free. Honestly, what feels entitled is expecting that one should be able to scale their business by orders of magnitude while retaining the price.
(And in general, charging for copying data feels a lot like charging for air, but that's another topic.)
But regardless, Coursera is really playing fast and loose with their credibility. It used to be that it was the place you could go to get a decent education on some topic for free, at any time and in your own pace. What it (and other sites like it) turned into is a money-making machine. You get forced to follow a particular schedule ("yadda yadda people can't learn if they're not forced"), the course materials are often available only during the particular time window and disappear as soon as the course ends, and now they're also employing a lot of dark patterns to make sure you can't even find the free courses. All that while talking how their mission is to bring accessible education to the world. Bullshit. They're just making money because media wrote a lot about them and made them look hot.
You know how real revolution in education looks like? It looks like this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11561770 - the original article + the comment thread + the links in that comment thread.
Well, it can be said about most of the SaaS companies but that's not how business works. If it doesn't cost you anything to produce, then you should give it away for free might look great at first sight but it's not that great in reality. So if the business is just giving away the product for free, why would someone pay for that? You might say extra features, etc. But they are free to distribute as well!
If we apply this to the physical products, you can equally say that the companies shouldn't charge more than it costs to produce something. But if all companies worked this way, that would take us back to the stone age pretty quickly.
Money motivates people, motivate people produce goods.
But that's what happens in the physical world in face of competition (and that's the "great promise of capitalism", btw.) - prices fall down to minimal sustainable level unless someone is able to erect some artificial structure that will inflate them (like enough layers of middlemen).
But anyway, I don't mind Coursera or others trying out any business model they want. But them talking about a "mission to ensure access to education to everyone", etc.? This is getting dishonest. I'm criticizing them for saying they're doing this for humanity, while in fact getting further and further away from this goal every day.
In education, the artificial structure is often exclusivity in admissions. This also works for nightclubs.
No one would have whined much about add-ons for a cost. But to restrict what was originally part of the core free experience - the experience they built their reputation on - is why any backlash now is entirely of their own making.
For the most part, I'm not crazy about the Udacity platform and the lectures (they're too short, the mini-quizzes aren't always that great, and the platform doesn't feel like it has been improving in the past 2 years). However, all the value and learning is coming from the interactions with other students/TAs/professors on Piazza as well as the assignments/projects we do.
If you were to ask me how I would rate each component independently, I would say that Udacity is the weakest part of the experience.
For the most part it's intensive and immersive with enough learn-at-your-own-pace aspects to accommodate full-time jobs, families, hobbies, etc. I feel like I come away from every class like I've actually learned something that's embedded in me.
Udacity is what it is: a platform for watching videos with some minor ability to interact with coding examples / quizzes throughout. I have no issue with it, but agree that most of the meat of the courses come from other parts of the classes.
My hunch here, through Thrun's quotes and some in this, is that there were some aspects of CEO at this level that really didn't appeal to him. How many CEOs truly get to be personally creative in their position?
As a current Georgia Tech student, I welcome you.
I've often wondered what on-campus students think of the program given there are a lot of competing elements to having both at an esteemed CS school. I've tried thinking about my undergrad days and how I'd feel if there were an equivalent program.
However, I really really enjoyed my time actually being on campus. There were a few classes I took that would have been very difficult to do online, such as mobile & ubiq computing, where I got to spend quite a bit of time in the prototyping lab. I also had the chance to socialize a bit with professors and do some research with them. And personally, I don't do as well with online classes. I think it's really useful to have both kinds of programs. They're different experiences and they appeal to different people. Having both campus and online programs gives more opportunities to innovate in education.
I'm not too far into the program, but the courses I've seen are built around readings, projects, and Piazza (a student forum for us to talk to each other in). Piazza is where most of the interesting stuff happens. For my class, there's the professor but also 5-10 TAs who are swarming Piazza at most hours of the day responding to questions. Once a week, there are office hours for a couple hours hosted on Hangouts. There's your normal midterm and final exam, but the courses seem very much structured around deadlines rather than mandatory participation week to week.
It's been good thusfar.
The technical infrastructure from Udacity is a low key here. But the partnership, enablement and opportunity in providing 1000s of qualified students to pursue masters is a phenomenal achievement.
Forever grateful to Udacity and Sebastian Thrun for this program.
Yes it's the professors who create great courses but the post production part of udacity is also a big factor in keeping the quality high on the courses.
I found Udacity/Piazza to be adequate as a student while using my laptop. However, my wish is for the OMSCS program to embrace mobile as a viable method of consuming course content. Which isn't the case currently and rather disappointing as I travel quite a bit.
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/07/18/citing-disapp...
Instead, if you read the stats, they largely (though not exclusively) have ended up providing ongoing professional education to a range of motivated learners who already have undergrad and advanced degrees.
A student-centric view would use technology to help students have an educational experience around their own schedule and needs (e.g., varied pace; reinforcement or skipping where appropriate).
The issue is that, if you take away all structure, you also tend to take away most real-time interactions (which admittedly are a serious weakness of MOOCs anyway) and you end up with an experience that's not much different from reading a book and/or watching online video talks/lectures/documentaries/etc. or, indeed, just doing some project. Of course, there's nothing wrong with learning that way. But, at some point, you then go--why bother with this MOOC thing anyway if I just want to learn something?
Simple ideas: - Rolling start dates - Weekly collaboration days/times where all students who happen to be at a shared point in the course, or a shared point in their understanding of the material, discuss
These have their own drawbacks, too, but they're possible. Especially if the network is big enough. Once you have a bunch of students doing this, you then go--why bother affiliating with one particular university if I can get the classes I need no matter where I sit?
I'm not particular privy to whatever tactical insight our leadership has on Udacity, Coursera, etc... but I can tell you where edX is looking to head as a MOOC when it comes to college/university partnerships.
We have our partner-developed content. This is stuff like Harvard's CS50, MIT's 6.00.1x, etc. High quality content. People are very eager to take the courses -- they're developed by professors, TAs, etc, from these schools, and, to be honest, there's a lot of front-loaded name recognition -- but there's also a good chunk of learners who go on to pay for a verified certificate. On the flipside, we've talked to major businesses (tens of thousands of employees) who say they're willing to treat these certificates, the output of these courses, in line with their campus equivalents. That's pretty huge for someone looking to beef up their resume.
The next evolution of what we're doing by partnering with these institutions are things like Arizona State University's Global Freshman Academy or MIT's MicroMasters. ASU's Global Freshman Academy is taking your entire "freshman" year on edX, and getting real credit from it. MIT's MicroMasters (in Supply Chain Management) is taking a semester online, which makes you eligible for taking the rest of the degree (which is two semesters total) on campus. These cost money; they aren't entirely free like the standard courses on edX. However, they're deeply discounted and this is what our learners say they want.
Many people want credentials, they want them from top colleges and universities, and they want them targeted to specific fields. Ultimately, these people just don't feel confident figuring out which courses to take, and they want to be told which courses to take to get them to a specific place: better comprehension of X, better chances of job in a given field, etc. This is what is precipitating a lot of the advent of the specializations/nanodegrees, as you say.
(sorry, a little long-winded)
I am forever in his debt for his tireless work as an educator and his work on SLAM & Self Driving Cars.
Being taught by practitioners at the cutting edge of research like Thrun, Norvig, Ng, & Hinton is the education I dreamed of. I hope that Udacity develops into a full research vehicle and offers its own qualifications, the UKs Open University is a good model for this.
His 2015 talk on democratising education is visionary, practical and disruptive. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=898S7o9UnPA
Accessibility issues, yes.
Disrupting traditional teaching, learning, practicing....hmmm?
I think the evolution of education is probably technology supporting traditional teaching, along with some way of easily varying the curriculum or the learning mode to accommodate different learning styles.
For that to happen I would guess that making designing curricula, lesson plans and activities easier to do would be a good start.
Or what if the tailored aspect of private instruction could be scaled up? For example, if you give a tough math problem to 1,000,000 students, and want to have a tutor walk them through the problem, you'd need to have 1,000,000 tutors. But there are probably only 20 types of mistake one can make on a given math problem. So if you had a "choose your own adventure" solution, one math teacher could, in a month, record lessons that reach a hundred million students at a personalized level.
Or, one could make a cost-effective way to learn from the absolute top practitioners in a field. Most people cannot afford private basketball lessons with an NBA basketball coach, for example. But let's say such a coach watched 10,000 people play basketball for five minutes each, and recorded five minutes of feedback for each person (about one year of full-time work). Then, you could upload a video of you playing, you could algorithmically analyze the user's playing style, and match them to the person in the set of 10,000 that matches them best. The five minutes of feedback might be really useful to that person, and can be delivered at scale.
Not quite. There may be 20 different types of mistake you could make on the problem (I would make a lower estimate, personally), but you can make them in several different places, and the influence of a mistake will be felt in the rest of the problem.
Udacity deals with this currently by never assigning complicated problems that might see a mistake in one step show up in a later step; this isn't quite ideal as instruction, but it makes it possible to automate handling the assignments.
Some relevant cartoons:
Key computer science concepts went from being incomprehensible to being remarkably easy, and I didn't need to spend a small fortune on textbooks either. So to some extent, a revolution has already happened.
But I agree, there's much more to the structure of education that technology can help with, but not supplant. Universities aren't going away (or radically changing) any time soon.
In many instances, the teacher actually knows what should be done to improve the learning of a student - but is logistically constrained from providing that level of service (Bloom's 2 sigma problem). The low hanging fruit is removing those constraints.
We will need better tools for understanding the knowledge/abilities of our students in a much more refined manner.
Per the article...
Just personal interpretation whenever someone says he or she is focusing on innovation without too much information: "I am not sure what I want to do, I am going to pretend I know what I want to do with the company's money here."
What is innovation these days?