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Comment by edshiro | Hacker News Reader

This seems like a necessary reset, especially given their very high valuation. I personally enjoyed most of Udacity's Self-Driving Car Engineer Nanodegree. The content was great and at the time I had a very supportive mentor (gutted they got rid of this feature). Moreover, they have managed to build a large community of current students and alumni who keep in touch even after the nanodegree is over.

I would suggest they reduce the number of courses they offer and improve quality. I tend to see them as a more "premium" MOOC but I do agree that quality of content is variable depending on course.

Another area they should naturally look at is training for employees in corporations. I really hope Sebastian Thrun can turn things around.

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I am currently going through the self-driving car engineer nano degree and I completely disagree. The content was not useful for anything besides trying to to make students be able to complete the projects. They completely skip over and hard theory or mathematics probably because most people would struggle with it

In all fairness there is a big difference between research AI and applied AI/ML. You can spend lots of time on the former before even touching a keyboard. But people can do useful things with the latter with a fairly light dose of theory.

I did the first semester of that course. It was ML 101 repeated several times. It lacked any rigor. I hope to god no-one who finishes that course has an important job working on self driving cars. Moveing fast and breaking things shouldn’t apply to driving.

I completely agree with the quality arguments.

Everyone...let's be honest with ourselves and what we want from these moocs. I don't know about everyone else but what I want is high-quality courses that are online and basically free. Ads are okay and premium features are okay (like live tutoring or a human given lecture). When I say high-quality I want the content to be similar to what you would get from a Harvard, Stanford or other top university in the field in terms of the content. I want to learn the same topics. Don't water it down and make it simple. I want the real deal with the difficulty and all. Once that is accomplished..work on building tools that make these subjects easier to learn.

This is quite a hurdle to build but ultimately this is what we need. We need a free online university that teaches the same material you would learn from a top university. I don't like the watered down MOOCs that udacity, coursera and udemy offer.

I don't know about everyone else but what I want is high-quality courses that are online and basically free

What you want then is EdX. Every course is backed by a real-world institution that people have heard of, and they are free to audit, pay only if you want the certificate and/or to support their nonprofit mission

There are occasional trash courses on EdX though. If I hadn’t already started on LouvainX’s MicroMaster’s in International Law Amnesty International’s course on the law of asylum and refugees would have turned me right off. The intellectual level of that course was round about middle school.

I've had the same issue! People say that EdX is so great and it is equivalent in course quality but it simply isn't. I haven't' seen that. All of the courses are heavily watered down...and I mean significantly watered down like you don't even learn 20% of what you learn from the traditional course in college.

I've tried EdX as well and no that is not what I want.

> We need a free online university that teaches the same material you would learn from a top university.

I think this is Khan Academy [0]. It is a great resource that I've been using for quite a while. They even gamify it a little with points and avatars that you can buy. Funny thing is, like a lot of traditional universities, it lags behind on buzz-wordy courses.

[0] https://www.khanacademy.org/

Khan Academy is no where near what I have in mind. Khan Academy is a tutorial site, not a replacement for traditional courses. Big difference.

Khan Academy is far from a tutorial site. They have entire lesson plans, lectures, reading assignments, tests and a decent and helpful community in the comments. They cover just about all the material from Kindergarten to a Bachelors Degree.

Khan Academy is a better educational environment than I've ever experienced.

I've done the same comparison and there is no real comparison. Khan excels in the k-12 area because most of the schools these days have extremely limited curriculum and generally teach a series of limited topics in each subject they teach. Sure, for that type of stuff Khan is okay. When you get into the university level stuff...it is definitely not what you learn from a BA degree.

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