Accenture to Acquire Udacity | Hacker News Reader

Accenture to Acquire Udacity

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141 pointshiyer80 comments

I paid over $1,000 for one of their “nanodegree” programs. After it ended, they had the nerve to lock all the content, including all my notes and submissions as well as course content like videos and such. I highly recommend anyone avoid them.

Yep, I'm done paying for DRM locked content.

For courses, Udemy is hit or miss unfortunately. I wish there was an explicit way to tell before buying the course whether it allowed downloading the material (including the videos).

All Udemy and udacity material is downloadable on the high seas.

Indeed, this is where these companies seem to desperately want us to go. I do hope something changes but we're heading in the absolute wrong direction with things like Google's Chrome attestation garbage.

I was paying for another site monthly where there was an "inofficial" way to download videos. Stopped my subscription when they updated the site and downloading didn't work anymore

Well, they have the aUdacity. missed pun opportunity /s

Yeah, same feeling when the literal face of their React course wasn't actually the expert he claimed to be:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18601298

You may be able to get all your notes under a GDPR request or your local equivalent in other clarets of the world.

Wth js a nano degree lol. Some kind of fancy certificate?

> As for Udacity, which was founded in 2011, it gave the usual kinds of statements a company makes when it gets acquired by a much larger organization like Accenture. That is, it believes that it can reach more people and help them acquire skills as part of the larger entity. That goes without saying, but there had been rumors earlier this year that the company was in talks with Indian edtech company Upgrad with an asking price of $80 million. Apparently that deal fell through and Accenture ended up buying them instead.

I wouldn't be shocked if it was low. I remember during the online learning boom of the mid-to-late 2010s I spent some time studying a variety of courses on Udacity but I felt the depth wasn't there.

And now there's a lot of different options for online learning specialized to particular industries that are superior to general platforms like Udacity. For example, when I was learning DL, I joined a local study group that went through fast.ai together.

“But the depth wasn’t there”

They’ll get on great with Accenture then!

There's a disruption coming. One of the clearest LLM use cases is in learning and development. Another one is in producing "first drafts" of documents based on past work and "best practices". Both areas are what Accenture (and Deloitte, etc) excel at.

It's also a major disruptor for their business model: if the effort spent on "first drafts" and simple analysis is made automatically by LLMs, then you dont need as many juniors; your employee base gets smaller. But then how do you get experts if you hire fewer (better even) juniors? big consulting Cos are pyramids and these pyramids need feeding, continuously.

I think this is a brilliant move: Accenture has tons of capability in L&D that they've built up for their own purposes --feeding the pyramid. It's a capacity that they can easily offer to enterprises as an additional service, and they will probably use a lot of LLMs to deliver it. OTOH, this also gives them optionality in upskilling people (pushing them up the pyramid) while maybe having a narrower pyramid base because of the LLM disruption.

Expect Deloitte and the others to follow. It's too good a play.

I am so grateful to Udacity and the CS 101 course. I had tried to learn programming at least three times using different resources. Each time I struggled with basic concepts and it seemed like I'd just never figure it out.

Then in 2012, I tried the CS 101 course and finally everything just fell into place. Obviously it just taught me the basics, but I came out of that course with the feeling that I could keep at it and make some really interesting stuff. The next two years were a really exciting time for me as I switched majors to CS and then got a paid internship in 2014 (from a post on Who's Hiring!). I've been working full-time since 2017 and I'm so happy that I was able to break into this industry.

That's a great story! What do you think it was about the course that made it click for you?

It’s been so long that I’m on fuzzy on some details. I felt like the explanations of these concepts were really effective:

- basic data structures like maps and arrays

- encapsulating logic in functions and showing how you can compose them to do cool things. Recursion clicked for the first time.

The overarching project was to make a web crawler and I thought that was super interesting. Of course you’re making a toy version but there was enough substance there to keep me engaged. I still think web crawling is fascinating and made a crawler in rust a couple years ago (which was obviously still super basic by real standards).

I joined Udacity when the mission was "Double the world's GDP" and the best engineers and researchers flocked there to create great content. I loved the culture and the people. It was family in the truest sense. When I left the company, it had been hijacked by greedy and stupid MBAs running the show with a huge number of unwanted meetings, buzzword-filled marketing, sub-par content, and burning cash with random "data-driven" experiments.

People passionate about education and those with genuine ideas were sidelined and many were let go in multiple rounds of layoffs. It's so painful to see Udacity being bought by Accenture, another MBA/consultants-led shitshow.

The courses that were created until circa 2018 were amazing. Those created afterward were barely worth the time, let alone the money.

I hope someday the great folks will get back together and build another great learning platform again.

I share the same sentiment! I also worked at Udacity until 2018. Those were some of the most fun years of my professional life. It was sad seeing the original people leave and, with them, dedication to the original mission. I know some folks are still kicking around edtech ideas, so who knows? Maybe Udacity 2.0, once again focused on "Double the world's GDP," will pop up one day?

This somewhat more editorialized (and IMO, informative) take was posted to an edtech founders Slack group that I'm part of. [1]

Usually when acquisitions are announced, there are congratulations and virtual high-fives filling the M&A channel...not today.

1: https://www.forbes.com/sites/dereknewton/2024/02/04/reported...

This is unfortunate to see. I remember when these alt-Ed startups were all the rage and there was a genuine belief that we were on the cusp of a paradigm shift in how we learned.

Would love to hear some success stories if anyone has any!

>> there was a genuine belief that we were on the cusp of a paradigm shift in how we learned

Why do you feel that belief has changed? I have used Khan Academy, Coursera, Udacity, OReilly Safari, and Udemy. All are great and each excels in different areas. Many have removed their all-access passes in the past year, but they all cost almost nothing compared to the alternatives. I could only have hoped for such awesome platforms existing when I was in high school or college.

For a sufficiently motivated learner, they are like rocket fuel for the mind. Their flexibility makes them great even for busy professionals.

They may be good resources but the energy in the air during that time was that they could challenge universities. It is clear with passed time that they didn't, and will not.

Yeah, challenging university system was there. But it turned out really very very few people were motivated enough to finish the whole course to level of completing certificate which were quite cheap.

Most people enrolled to audit tons of courses, caught a few lectures, got bored and moved on.

As with anything that is now present in abundance due to internet curation becomes the key and that is either not cheap or not available in general.

I seriously "took" a few mostly not too challenging MOOCs early on. But, once the novelty wore off, I take a few things on LinkedIn through my company from time to time and go to a few conferences but I find it's hard without a concrete objective of some sort to really go deep on a topic.

True. I also took few computer related and many non-career oriented courses in social science/ history etc. It was fun and then life got busy.

> but I find it's hard without a concrete objective of some sort to really go deep on a topic.

I think this is key. With gazillion courses out there I don't know what is my end goal while randomly choosing interesting courses.

Further, work has become increasingly crappier where no matter what problem to be solved just plan to shove all stuff in Microservice/Kafka/Gitlab/Kubernetes meat grinder. And I remain unmotivated to take any course on these topics.

Learning has changed dramatically. There are incredible YouTube channels on every subject. Open courses are offered by top Universities for free.

What hasn't changed is credentialism. Because knowledge is free, everyone can claim to have it. So the value of a credential has gone up. An actual MIT degree vs classes taken at MIT OpenCourseware is orders of magnitude more significant.

You can learn anything for free now. Proving you've learned it is still heavily gate kept.

> An actual MIT degree vs classes taken at MIT OpenCourseware is orders of magnitude more significant.

Most people are not autodidacts, so this would be a common perception even without the credentialism.

Pretty much. I feel that most people fall in the category of "it would be nice to have these skills", but they aren't necessarily willing to pay the sacrifice in time and investment for it. Same applies for school really, yeah it would nice if I got an A for algorithmic game theory, and maybe the concepts are kinda interesting from a general level, but the nitty gritty is way too complex and painful for me to put beyond in what's required for a B. A big draw of college admissions is to filter out those not passionate.

Learning without passion is the elephant in the room, and I feel once we can solve that then we can look at a real revolution. Although perhaps for the gulf between the passionate and the unpassionate, we may not be that interested in solving it.

The quality, accessibility and style of how educational material and instruction has a hand here.

This seems to put much on any given individual having some necessary bit set which isn’t really how people work.

I think the Duolingo approach has proven pretty successful, breaking things down into very small pieces with lots of encouragement and practice. Certainly it's a challenge to apply it to other subject areas, especially if you're trying to teach software that the student has to open up separately and use, but it's not impossible. It just takes an enormous amount of work structuring and optimizing the questions, UX and learning sequence.

There was sort of a naive belief that both credentialism and motivation could be solved if the material were out there. And, by and large, that wasn't true especially among the people who needed them the most.

There's a huge amount of material out there for people who want it. But it's most applicable to people who already have credentials in some form.

There have been huge changes, and where you do not need the credentials, or can get credentials separately from the courses, it has changed dramatically.

I have one a number of online courses, watched lectures that are put on Youtube, used material from university courses from their websites, and more. Some work related, some just for fun.

I do not think everyone has caught up with the changes, and the benefits for general education.

It is not just for adult, professional or university level education either. There has is a lot available for school level (to be clear in the British sense - primary school, secondary school/high school) education.

Schools have not (yet, I hope) changed although what some did during lockdown showed what could be done, but home educators have (at least to an extent): online courses, remote tuition, online materials are a huge advance on textbooks plus local classes or tutors. For example my daughter is doing an online course for history GCSE (UK exam taken at 16 in schools, roughly high school diploma level AFAIK), has a remote tutor for classical civilisation GCSE (and help with latin revision though she self taught that). The supervision for the observations for astronomy GCSE was done remotely too.

There is a lot of potential to do things differently, but change takes time. Systems have a lot of inertia in them.

I completed the CompSci X-Series of MITx on edX, and Software Engineering for IaaS, from BerkeleyX. They were so awesome that I can only think they phased them out because it was such a bargain. Practically, the courses allowed me to change career and to be well positioned.

Well, you're probably at least sortof right. Once the bloom went off the MOOC rose, edX got sold off to an EdTech company. In general, universities decided that shoveling money and effort into the MOOC pit didn't do a lot to further their mission. MIT mostly continues OCW as sort of a sideline. I don't know how many resources actually go into it at this point.

Schools and colleges work because they enforce discipline first and foremost, and learning only secondarily. With online programs, if there is no discipline inherent in the student, which is the vast majority of people, there is no paradigm shift. Certainly, the best students will naturally learn, from any source, but that has been true historically.

Peter Norvig’s udacity class was probably the thing that made me employable when I was just getting started. Udacity in general was an amazing resource around 2012-14(+?) because it was very high quality and free. They had courses that would get you through an interview but also a decent amount that went deeper. I will always have good memories of them.

Same here!

I liked Steve Huffman’s web dev 101 class and was also a code reviewer at Udacity shortly after

I actually got my break in tech through a program Accenture ran called the Veteran Technology Training Program. It was essentially a partnership with Udacity where they sponsored veterans through a 12 week Java course. At the conclusion of the training, they ran me through a series of interviews and extended a job offer. I ended up doing systems analysis work for them, which was a nice introduction to the field, especially considering my military occupation was infantry--not exactly tech-adjacent. After a few years of programming in my spare time and building up a portfolio, I got an opportunity at another company to do web dev, which I've been doing since.

I think it's pretty cool to see this acquisition happen. I can't speak for what Udacity has become since 2015 (when I went through the course), but it definitely benefited me.

Awesome! I’ll eat crow for my opening comment. I had no idea something like that existed.

Sounds sad, but I’ve subscribed to the belief that your degree doesn’t prove your knowledge. It proves you can go through certain obstacles, dedicate a few years of your life to something specific, which can be a redeemable factor during hiring. Basically an easy initial filtering method. Obviously there are an enormous number of exceptions, especially for specialized degrees.

Online education services will always have a hard time convincing the worth of their degrees to others. If people are taking those courses to just broaden their knowledge or learn something new, that’s great, I support that. But as a replacement for a degree from a physical university? Doubt it.

I learned a lot about cryptography in Stanford Cryptography I and II courses, and about machine learning in Andrew Ng course (but it was years ago so it's kind of useless now)

I then tried to learn compilers on something Standford has called LaGunita or whatever and it was closed while I was studying it (and it never worked properly). But I wouldn't finish that course anyway, compilers are hard.

I always confuse Udacity with Udemy

I came here to say the same thing.

Same with Zendesk and Freshdesk

I always suffuse Audacity with Academy

> if the rumored $80 million price tag was correct, that was a precipitous drop in value for a company that raised almost $300 million, per PitchBook, and sported a $1 billion valuation in 2015

So investors lost money

I did the The Full Stack Nanodegree from Udacity around 2015 and took one advanced C++ programming course back around 2018. I learned so much from those two and the content was challenging immersive and the feedback in the community was helpful.

The difference when I took the course in 2018 was apparent to me the quality change in the community, the grader and code reviews were non-existent, however the class mates were still engaging.

It saddens me to see a big faceless corp buying this out. I think out of all the online learning platforms, Coursera, Udemy, MIT edx, Udacity had the best product by far. Its weird to see that with COVID and distance learning becoming essential that they did not blow up as a big thing.

I was among the people who benefited from udacity in the very beginning. They pretty much got me on the track for a software engineering career for which I will be forever grateful.

Feels more than a little sad that they just get acquired by a multinational.

A lot of people are wondering why MOOCs as a whole industry failed. I learned a lot from MOOCs, and can attribute much of my professional success to MOOCs. I can think of these reasons-

1. There are so much great content available for free, it almost doesn't make sense to pay for stuff.

2. Lots of universities, including MIT, NYU release their content for free along with handouts, assignments, problem sets, etc. And many great professors from other unis also release a lot of courses for free.

3. Much of the focus was on certificates, and honestly employers don't value them a lot, and higher education institutes don't value them at all.

4. Quality diminished in MOOCs. The early MOOCs from 2010s are of greater quality than the stuff that are released recently.

5. To make it in life, you are far better off with a university degree rather than without. And, people can't solely rely on online education.

6. MOOCs are expensive. Udacity nanodegrees were $1,000. My entire Master’s degree in CS was ~$1500 (in India).

7. They started focusing more on online degrees which almost no one value. And they are obscenely expensive. And platforms focus more and more on them. Think of Sedgewick's Algorithms course on Coursera. I don't see any new course of similar quality there. Focus is entirely on the online "degrees".

8. Good people left to do something cooler to them. The people who created Coursera, Udacity, etc. now do something else. Most provably some AI startup. People not similar to them are running the show now.

9. Coursera, edX, Udacity all have horrible, slow UIs. After a 2-8 minutes lecture (played in 1.5x) makes you wait a slow full 2 seconds to load the next page. And this is breaking, IMO. I would take a 2.5 hours university class lecture over this any day.

10. Unis use their own platform and abandoned joint ventures (?) because, maybe, lack of control. MIT has MITx, and some truly great new courses. I don't think they upload in edX anymore.

11. As per their behaviour, they focused on company-wide training, upskilling, etc. But I think most corporates don't look to upskill employees in a holistic way. They just want some tool specific training for their employees, that are too the point, practical in a negative way, and solely focuses on the tool at hand. Not every company is Texas Instruments, Facebool AIR, DeepMind, etc.

12. Despite all these, MOOCs are still successful, now often riding on particular people. They have their own websites with their own pricings, and own UI design. Think Jeremy Howard with fast.ai.

I think these are causes for the decline of MOOCA hype wave.

The collapse in value of OPMs and EdTechs is something to behold: Byju's, Coursera, 2U, Udacity ...

I don't understand it.

Because they mostly turned out to be something that professionals, often already with multiple degrees, were willing to dabble in for free. They didn't really alter the education landscape in any significant way--in part because any certificates weren't really valued by companies.

Many certs are absolutely valued - look at the number of people who change careers with a cert from UC Berkeley Extension - and beyond that, 2U and Coursera, and others, were heavily investing in the degree space.

The explanation for their failure is more complex than "certs are worthless."

Obviously 2U overpaid for edX, but that's just one example. And why didn't edX do better?

Don't know much about the others but Byju's is nothing like Coursera or edX. Both of the latter two have a much better reputation. Byju's is unfortunately known for predatory practices.

I brushed through the article real quick, but what is the likely reasoning for Accenture to acquire Udacity? Is this content play, or talent?

A mix of brand and content. They'll keep the brand up and running, and perhaps many people won't even know it's owned by Accenture. They'll get some data on the back end and perhaps use it as a method for identifying talent.

Accenture does a lot of training and education, both training their in house consultants as well as offering tailored training programs to their clients. I'm guessing that they see this as a platform for improving and streamlining the delivery of these courses.

This definitely wasn't in my 2024 bingo card.

What does Accenture (or for that matter Udacity) have to gain from this acquisition?

Free training for their worldwide consultants? They probably spend a small fortune on in house training and development, makes sense to just acquire a company to do it for them (and have a platform to resell this IP through)

There could also be a trojan horse play to see what companies are training their employees on so as to offer competitive managed services around it.

They are going to increase prices then offer discounts to corporate clients I suppose

Accenture has >730,000 employees (https://newsroom.accenture.com/fact-sheet)

Much of their model is hiring entry-level to junior resources, upskill them, bill them out to clients at high mark-ups. Many parts of the workforce follow an up-or-out mentality and technical/functional upskilling is a key component to this, rather than just tenure.

Purchasing a platform to train that many people is probably a bargain compared to what they are probably doing now -- letting everyone choose their own platform and reimbursing the retail cost.

It is definitely a bargain compared to what they did when I worked there -- they owned and operated an entire University-like campus called "St. Charles Illinois" and flew people in from all over the world.

Agree. At Accenture's training budgets level I'd imagine 5-10% of that money could churn out hundreds of new courses per year.

The whole ex-MOOC and other online learning landscape has basically turned into (and mostly always was) continuing professional education. It's nice that there are still some options out there like OCW but it's mostly been a pretty dismal failure from the perspective of really transforming anything.

This is part of that list where at one point computer were supposed to totally transform learning in school. We know it didn't happen. Them mobile/smartphone were supposed to transform learning on the go that also didn't happen. But worry not, now personalized AI agents will totally transform learning. There will be individualized lectures for every students. No more lack of attention from teachers be bottleneck in learning.

Yeah. And it's not like broadcast university lectures and some rudimentary echoes of in-person grading systems are some pinnacle of providing effective education. There's nothing wrong with video lectures--I take LinkedIn classes at work from time to time for certain topics--but it's usually because something appeals to an immediate need and being visual is at least useful.

How would this work?

I presume Accenture still has to invest the course content that is specific for them, and then use Udacity as the distribution platform. Why couldn't they do that before just like all the universities that uploaded their courses to Udacity?

I wonder if Accenture will also try to sell it as an add on in their contracts. Selling education to companies is much more lucrative than selling it to students.

The closest one of these companies has gotten to profitable is Udemy via their business segment.

Given you were in Accenture, you might appreciate the 'vertical' (those who 'find' work - consultants and senior management) vs the 'horizontal' (those who do work, and their management).

St. Charles will still exist for the vertical, and for the chosen horizontal. An acquisition like this is for the horizontal and once internalised sufficiently to sell to clients, the selling the product not any individual training course which are pretty fungible. Online corporate in-house training's been lagging consumer bells-and-whistles for a decade, it'll be a flashier-better product than current competition.

> What does Accenture (or for that matter Udacity) have to gain from this acquisition?

Accenture's core competency is getting governments (and large companies) to hand over large sums of money. Seems like a good fit.

That's what I don't understand, why would they spend all that money on Udacity, rather than spending it on champagne and Ferraris for senior officials? Where's the ROI for Udacity?

Udacity seems like the kind of thing governments and large companies would love to pay large sums of money to; it's something you can point to to say you're doing something good, which ultimately increases the champagne-and-Ferrari budget. So there's a synergy there.

Accenture also performs weird menial tasks under guise of efficiency for large corps apparently unable to do it themselves. I would venture they will also roll out platform to enable corps to run their banal trainings on it (compliance etc)

Accenture has lots of corporate clients, probably 90% of the Fortune 1000; they could easily make an SSO sign-on work (like Percipio does with companies I am aware of) and give access to all or part of the content for a set fee per-month or a low per-course fee for employees of those companies.

While I haven't worked for Accenture, I have worked for other consulting companies and designing and delivering custom in house eduction programs to companies was a non-trivial part of what parts of the company did. I imagine that they see Udacity as a platform for growing that part of the business.

"You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain…"

Now that Sebastian Thrun has succeeded at replacing all American universities with Udacity, he can focus fully on self-driving cars... or little electric aircraft for rich people... or whatever it is that is his next innovation that is guaranteed to succeed by the gullible tech press.

Out of all the hyped fads on HN a decade ago, MOOCs have fallen even harder than drone startups. What happened to disrupting the overpriced hollow credentialism of higher education?

MOOCs kind of demonstrated that it isn't so hollow, even if just as a filtering function for capable people. Anyone can get the curriculum taught at MIT or Yale now and yet there has been no massive upskilling in the world, nor are there tons of people who attribute MOOCs for tremendous success. Even the ads for the MOOCs now are competing more with DeVry Or U of Phoenix instead of any serious institute of higher education.

The expectation vs reality seems reminiscent of earlier utopian ideas about the web itself and how instant access to all knowledge would change humanity.

I think it did change humanity. People are howling and shouting more. Fake news, infomercials are providing all the information to humanity which gatekeepers like college/universities/libraries didn't really provide. Wealth is getting concentrated among people who promote those platforms and work there.

A lot of people assumed that once you provided a way to bypass the admission and tuition gates, there was no reason they too couldn't be as successful as the average Stanford or MIT grad. In practice, it had very little impact.

I think these cars and planes will run on cutting edge technology like Andreessen-Horowitz AI HotAir for power and Block chains for seatbelts. This will change everything.

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