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I disagree strongly with this statement, having "taken" a couple of courses on Udacity. I didn't complete any of the courses, and from Thrun's point of view I'd be another example where they can improve. But this is an erroneous metric, both because students gain without completing the course assignments and because an in-person classroom only motivates you to do assignments by nature of having you pay $$$ for the credential. Unless Udacity credentials dangle you a job offer, there is much less incentive to do the work.

Does that mean the class is a failure? Not at all. I found the format and interactive quizzes to be superior to the college classes I took. In addition, you got to skip around to take what you needed, and work on what you like. It doesn't fit credentialism, but as a resource it was unmatched.

I didn't do any of the assignments for CS101 or CS253, which taught python and building web applications, but from there I was able to build a webapp far more complicated than their assignments required (basically I chose my own assignment).

http://sudokuisland.com

I'd never have been able to find the time and patience to sit through a university class just to build a side project, not to mention cash investment. I can honestly say that without Udacity this wouldn't have happened. For the woman quoted knocking the lack of human contact: sorry this wasn't a social club for you.

> The world doesn't need another way to spoon-feed infotainment to well-off people with good academic backgrounds

Actually, that is exactly what the world needs, and the comments here further emphasize that the demand is there. Before these MOOCs appeared on the scene, the resources were almost non-existent. I don't care about school, I just want to learn. A service like Netflix, but with MOOC-like content would be perfect.

It saddens me that Thrun, who I have found to be exceptionally good at the job, is more interested in schooling than learning – but I get it from a business aspect. These results dash the hopes of what Udacity hinted would become their business model.

Actually, that is exactly what the world needs...I don't care about school, I just want to learn.

The disconnect is that you probably don't need to learn as badly as someone impoverished and living in the more closed societies that Thrun is trying to reach.

For them to become competitive in the world market they need to have skills and knowledge that you and most of the people with access to computers and the internet take for granted. So I agree with the parent comment that the world does not need another way for someone with a BS to get marginally smarter on an esoteric topic (for 99% of humanity) like AI. We need a platform for those without access to education to learn how to do basic coding, or learn other skills that will be needed in the coming decades.

"Actually, that is exactly what the world needs, and the comments here further emphasize that the demand is there."

It emphasizes that lots of people on the internet want something for nothing, which has a surprise quotient of exactly zero.

I could see paying for a quality educational service. I already pay for Netflix and only spend a fraction of the time watching it compared to what I spend on watching MOOC-style videos. Udacity isn't really there though. The videos are top notch, but the user experience is not very good.

Out of curiosity, would you be willing to pay for it if you were explicitly subsidizing students who couldn't pay for it?

It doesn't seem like Thrun put a lot of effort into popularizing the approach either. He gave 1.5 years and a pilot program to affirm a product that undermines years of ingrained ritual and validity? It doesn't seem like he was ever interested in changing education.

Does it really matter if 10,000 enroll with an 80% completion rate, or if 160,000 enroll with a 5% completion rate?

The numerator is the important metric here, not the denominator.

It matters when you think about scaling up to replace colleges. Put 5 million college students / year through that funnel and you won't have an educated citizenry.

No, but if you put 100 million students / year through that funnel, you'll achieve meaningful learning for the same 5 million students, with access to the world's best instructors, at a fraction of the cost.

And the other 95 million will get more exposure to knowledge than they had before, even if they don't take it to completion.

It's hard for me to find the failure here.

How do you measure educational value? If someone finishes 90% of the class but never takes the final exam, have they learned nothing? If someone finishes the class, aces the exam, and then promptly goes on living their life as an IT professional without any tangible change, was the course anything more than "infotainment"?

I'm not sure how you measure "real" learning, but course completion doesn't seem to be a good way of doing it.

If you stop reading a book after 20% or 50% or 90%, have you wasted your time? Possibly not, but you haven't read the book, either.

A well-designed course isn't a random bag of stuff. It has a starting point and an ending point, and skipping out before the end can certainly be regarded as a failure, at least by the instructor.

> How do you measure educational value? If someone finishes 90% of the class but never takes the final exam, have they learned nothing?

Here's the thing: you can't tell.

Why is there a final exam? Because otherwise, you can't tell. It's an exit survey.

This is one of the clearest indicators that Udacity and other MOOCs aren't actually "revolutionizing" anything in education; they're just making an economic gamble on an iteration.

It cracks me up that all of the early comments on this thread are so insistent that course completion shouldn't be a goal. Anyone who has taught a college course can tell you that self-reported satisfaction rates are useless as an educational metric. Everyone "wants" to learn, but almost nobody puts in the effort. MOOCs have provided this hype-driven bubble where the people who "want" education get to pretend that they're learning without actually doing much of anything.

Course completion is a valid goal, and an important number. The point that I'm making is that a 5% completion rate is still a success, when multiplied by the massive number of people enrolling.

For an individual, if you watched the first three videos of linear algebra and stopped, you didn't learn the subject and can't honestly claim you took the course. If you finished it past-deadline but did all the exercises, you're probably ready to take the next course.

Udacity and Coursera are a step forward. Perfect? Far from it. Ready to replace Stanford? No, not even close. Is the world better with them than it would be without them? Absolutely.

Education, in technology, is there mainly to give you a root set and confidence. If you actually want to get into machine learning, you have to start reading papers anyway. That goes whether you're a graduate student or a DIYer who's been in industry for almost a decade like me.

It seems like they have a chicken and egg problem. If the courses aren't valuable aside from the benefits of learning (which can be accomplished through other means), then why bother completing them? Meanwhile, it's hard to take the courses seriously when only 5% of the enrollment finishes the course.

They can't expect valid results until the utility of the product is valuable.

it's hard to take the courses seriously when only 5% of the enrollment finishes the course.

Same comment as michaelo.

why does the completion rate matter? If 100,000 people sign up, and 5% complete the course, that's 5k people.

The US is graduating around 12k CS majors per year, so 5k seems like a material number of students to educate.

> If the courses aren't valuable aside from the benefits of learning (which can be accomplished through other means),

The combination of lecture, graded exercise, guided reading (usually) and time constraints that Coursera and EdX courses have is, IMO/IME, a very good combination for learning that makes them better than many other alternatives for the purposes of learning (Udacity is, comparatively, fairly bad at some parts of this.)

> Meanwhile, it's hard to take the courses seriously when only 5% of the enrollment finishes the course.

I think that completion is a bad metric. One of the benefits of MOOCs is that it lowers the sunk cost of entry which encourages broader enrollment, particularly enrollment by people who are experimenting with the content or less certain that outside commitments will be able to be contained in a way that allows completion.

The idea that % complete is a measure of how many people are deriving an educational benefit is wrong.

I spell it out with examples in another comment here, but one shouldn't assume that everyone has equal access to the foundation and motivation needed to put out the "effort" to succeed in MOOCs.

The people who are really educationally disadvantaged are often that way because of some other difficult circumstances in their lives (violence, social breakdown, poor parenting, and the associated effects on motivation).

I'm not referring to (typical) hacker news types here (myself included). You could give us all the extra educational access in the world and you wouldn't make a dent in educational inequalities, whether in the US, or globally.

You're right but I'd like to add that MOOC added a new path to my options into learning, a less atomic one, I can put the effort and complete x% before dropping out of exhaustion, and come back not long after that and gather x% more.

It might better fit adult learning process as, at least I, get distracted more easily (less focus power, more things to handle, different brain). Actually that may be why Thrun is going into corporate education...

The problem is not the initiative, it is the product. Merely replicate the classroom form of education to web will not cut it. It is not people learn things once they are out of campus hence the high drop out rate. The most agitated group of people in term of perpetrated learning is programmers. This professor needs to get his cue from place like GitHub, even YouTube. His class content design is boring ... Desperate needs innovation.

But it is educating more people for less money.

Can you enumerate the costs involved so that we can see how much less they are?

Call it 7,000 undergrad students at Stanford. 80,000 courses complete at Udacity would be about 11 courses per student, or a very solid academic year of courses.

So we could reasonably say the number of Udacity student-courses complete is similar to a year of Stanford's.

Call it $40,000 for a Stanford undergrad for a year. A total of $280,000,000 for those 7000 undergrads.

Udacity has raised $22 million.

So an entire order of magnitude less than Stanford tuition costs for a similar number of student-courses complete.

Of course Stanford tuition doesn't just go to classroom operations, but that's kind of the point, isn't it?

Doesn't make an order-of-magnitude change, but two quibbles with the numbers:

1. Stanford sticker-price tuition is ~$44k, but a very small percentage of students pay full price. For example anyone whose family earns less than $100k/year (!) pays no tuition at all. A ballpark guess at average tuition actually paid is ~$20k, though I can't find an official number. Plus Stanford is probably not really the right peer; Udacity is competing to a large extent (in terms of who they might conceivably displace) with cheaper education providers, like community colleges or even the Cal State system.

2. In addition to the $22m, Udacity is currently getting some $millions in donated labor from universities, which are lending out their professors to develop Udacity curricula and teach courses as part of experimental partnership agreements. Long-term it seems that Udacity will need to pay for this labor themselves, if it's to be revenue-neutral rather than cross-subsidized by universities.

1 - It's not about what the students themselves pay, it's about the cost. And I picked Stanford as sort of middle of the road cost-wise for private education. Public schools are of course subsidized heavily by tax dollars, which reduces tuition but certainly not the actual cost of the education. As far as quality, Udacity instructors and courses are far, far above a typical community college.

2. I picked Udacity since their courses are custom developed for the platform. Coursera courses are often very similar to the courses the instructors developed at their "day job" univeristies, the Udacity courses aren't really. They're new beasts.

4 courses at coursera: $0

4 courses at my local state university: $5000

-

Hell lets be a little bit more equitable:

4 courses at coursera with the signature track: $200

4 courses at my local community college: $400

I think the question was about costs of providing the service, not the tuition charged to students. How much does it cost to produce and operate a MOOC, in terms of total resources put into it? It's a bit difficult to account for, because in this early stage there is quite a bit of unaccounted-for labor. For example, there is some cross-subsidy from existing universities, because much of the Coursera/Udacity curriculum-dev and teaching work is done by professors who're drawing a full-time salary from a university (not from Coursera or Udacity). Nonetheless it'd be interesting to see some kind of ballpark estimate of how many total resources it takes to put together and teach a Coursera course, if hypothetically they were actually all billed.

I couldn't imagine the costs of running an online class being more than a brick and mortar.

That's the thing: if we're going to make claims about costs, we need to stop imagining them and actually run numbers. The numbers might be wrong, incomplete, or poorly chosen/framed, but those things can be pointed out and discussed.

There are two types of costs. First fixed cost that can be amortized such as professor's time. The cost is lower if it can be amortized over more students: MOOC 10000 students enrolled x 10% completion = 1000 students Stanford 100 students x 100% completion = 100 students

So MOOC can potentially amortize over many more students and thus lower the cost to serve each student. In addition at least for instruction purpose the cost of real estate: MOOC negligible Stanford owner's capitalized rent equivalent for the classroom

The second kind of cost is variable cost that is associated with each student: MOOC: video streaming cost * 10 (to account for 10% completion rate; being very conservative here since students who don't complete likely will also not consume the allotted video bandwidth) Stanford: transportation cost and student's time to get to and from the classroom; additional room and board living on or near campus vs living at home etc

I'm not entirely sure the faculty cost will be lower longer-term, but it depends on a lot of factors that influence how the market will develop, so I can't say for sure. One reason I think it might turn out higher is that MOOCs may be taught by fewer but more super-star professors than traditional universities. Right now the difference between a top and a mediocre professor in pay is not huge, maybe 2x-3x. But if MOOCs succeed in producing really massive-scale courses, the most popular, charismatic professors could become real media superstars. And if they do, and the market is big and competitive enough to support it, they might be able to garner huge salaries through bidding wars between MOOC providers.

For example, imagine that someone like Richard Feynman, rather than giving his famous lecture series at Caltech for his regular Caltech salary, were doing it in a future era of well-developed MOOCs. He announces he's going to do one final series of physics lectures, but he hasn't decided which MOOC company he's going to do it for. I bet he could negotiate a huge fee for that, much more than even a top-end professor is currently paid. Moving back to the modern day, what if, say, Elon Musk offered to teach a MOOC? You could go for a cheaper, less well-known lecturer, but then you risk looking like the 2nd-rate MOOC company compared to your competitors.

If that's how the market develops, MOOCs might have to pay fees closer to what the public-speaking circuit currently pays prominent lecturers, if they want to attract the top speakers. And those fees are orders of magnitudes higher than what a professor currently makes.

That is why I didn't put it as dollars and cents. If Musk is teaching a class, whether to 100 or 10000 students the cost to him is his time. If he teaches for free then the students capture all the value. Or he could try to capture most of the value for himself. Think of it this way suppose there is total value (or utility) V created through teaching and the cost is C, then the value added is V-C. The value added could go to the professor or the students but either way there is a net benefit to lowering C.

1997 Cambridge and Oxford University: FREE

1998 University tuition fees: 1000 GBP/yr

2004 University tuition fees: 3000 GBP/yr

2012 University tuition fees: 9000 GBP/yr

Thanks Tony Blair.