Udacity restructures operations, lays off 20 percent of its workforce

Furthermore, none of the MOOC providers have cracked the issue of credibility to employers, if I felt an Udacity nanodegree would be taken as seriously as a 'real' masters degree then I'd be willing to pay much more for it.

But when I'm just doing them more for self-fulfillment (as I'm sceptical employers give much credit to Coursera, Udacity etc.) then paying any more than 50 euros doesn't make sense.

Competitors to Udemy really need to do better marketing. The fee doesn't matter.

Keep in mind they had a deal with Georgia Tech's OMSCS, but something went awry there too.

I don't know what this looks like as a business but I can imagine it's easier to sell a relatively modest number of business subscriptions than it is to beat the bushes for a lot of retail $10-50 courses.

It's worth pointing out, that in many parts of Europe Master's degree is either free, or costs less than 7k. Of course, the quality cannot be easily compared.

Do we really want everything locked down and centralised or do we want a portfolio of tools, marketplaces and such adding up to an educational platform.

There is a lot of potential with interactive media using a computer that never gets applied to these online courses because of the technical limitations of teachers and related support staff. It is hard to make really good online courses.

As an example, take the University of Waterloo (by no means a top school in the world, but definitely up there in Canada). For the math faculty, in 2018 we had 16,000 applicants for undergrad math programs and admitted 1,200. That's a 7.5% acceptance rate. Beyond that, we regularly see upwards of 30% of first years fail one or more of their courses. Many of these fail two courses and are asked to withdraw.

You just don't see that with online courses. Anyone can take them and the high percentage who never complete the course are assumed to have lost interest, likely due to a lack of significant investment in the program. Brick and mortar universities signal serious commitment in time and money on the part of the student, in addition to ability.

I am pretty sure (90%) I got dropped from consideration by a FANG company because I don't have a degree.

Education is not a one size fits all - you cannot offer the same from MIT vs community college no matter if the course content is the same. The difficulty (proxied by the reputation of the school) of the same courses vary wildly and dramatically, as does workload, peer support, TA support, exams, and even the pace and how the final grade is curved.

By necessity they cannot grade difficultly, since they are trying to get people to pay for courses like they are dessert. By necessity they cannot offer different tiers of difficulty based on entrance exams or other tests, since they would insult their customer base (the intuitive argument being that those in most need of such nanodegrees are inversely the ones who may do worse in general).

Which gets even more difficult when places like Georgia Tech are offering fully accredited Masters of Science in Comp Sci programs, delivered fully online, for a grand total of $7500 in tuition.

I don't think any sort of 'certificate' or accreditation approach was the right strategy for them. I was probably their prime candidate for paid certs -- I am a lawyer who self-studied CS for 4 years and just recently successfully switched careers to software dev. I took so many online courses -- Coursera, edX, MIT's OpenCourseWare, Stanford's online courses. In every interview I had, the interviewers were impressed by the fact I took such a variety of courses (I listed them on my resume, underneath my "real" education history.)

But not a single one ever even asked if I had obtained any sort of certificates from them. No one cared, not even for a second. The whole story you want to tell when you go this way is, "I got the practical learning and experience I needed; I didn't go for an official degree because I felt the piece of paper wasn't worth the money." The proof (for potential employers) that you succeeded is in your abilities -- specifically, your portfolio of personal projects you create and are ready to present. Taking all those online courses shows initiative, curiosity, passion for the field; a certificate of any sort from some place like Udacity means less than nothing.

Would it have mattered any more if it was accredited by some accrediting body? My intuition says no. Employers feel comfortable relying on traditional degrees because they're, well, traditional. There's the whole cultural significance of them, and of the experience of attending a four year program. But, right or wrong, the value of these degrees comes from the school name. Is it a nationally known school? Or a regionally known one? Is it a school in the city that your interviewer (or their coworkers) attended? But if you come to them with some accredited papers from Udacity, there is going to be a very wide respectability gap that will have to be crossed.

It's not an inspiring approach, but I can't help but feel like a bland subscription model is probably the best they could have done. Maybe they could have become Google's Pluralsight or something. I think there's still definitely room for 'disruption' in the online education space, but I think it's probably going to look and feel a lot more like traditional higher ed than many might have thought 5 years ago -- even to the extent that I think we'll see traditional schools leading the way, because those traditional schools come to the starting block already carrying a lot of cachet. Why pay for a piece of paper if the name at the top means nothing?

And I can't speak to every Nanodegree, but the projects I worked on in my Nanodegree were 'easy' enough that it wasn't hard for the reviewers to mark. There wasn't a ton of room for creativity. Most importantly, their feedback was pretty mixed in terms of how in-depth they went. Often, they'd just link me to posts from other real-life experts to the point where I felt like I was getting most of the 'juice' from outside of Udacity.