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Comment by strongai | Hacker News Reader

Ironically, if he has left to concentrate on Udacity, my own belief is that he is a poor teacher. Of course it depends on which pedagogical teat you are sucking from, but my experience of Thrun's delivered Udacity courses is poor. Many of his video segments seem to involve him slavishly following his 'script', occasionally hissing out encouraging phrases such as 'Isn't this great!'. He hasn't sequenced a series of logical teaching moments in which the concepts flow nicely. It's as if he's decided his first draft is good enough. Just my opinion of course.

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Udacity has done what any good start-up should and launched a solid MVP and iterated on it, delivering free, in-demand courses in a short amount of time. No, the materials and scripts have not always perfect but they are still more valuable than many college courses I've taken. If he is in fact leaving to focus energy on Udacity, isn't that a positive move in regards to your critiques?

Yes, you make a good point. My opinion - and that's all that it is - is that his (many) abilities lie in the Google [x] direction, not as a poster boy for MOOCs.

I've recorded my self and many others teaching: there is only terrible teachers, and people who survive the humiliation of seeing themselves try more than twenty times. I would never let anyone watch any of their first five takes first.

But who are we to say where he should apply his abilities? He may be interested in something new and that is where his next best contributions lie.

Isaac Newton famously had to give three lectures to students at Oxford in order to maintain his status as a professor. His first was so dense and impenetrable that the final two were given to utterly empty rooms. Apparently that did not alter his teaching style at all.

One does not have to be a good teacher to have something worth learning from.

That said I did one of his first courses and found it simple to follow and better in the bite sized format than traditional lectures.

Weird. My opinion is that he is a fantastic teacher. I did his Stanford AI course online and it was by far the best learning experience I have had.

One doesn't have to be a good teacher to make a good, free, online University. But one does need at least some content to get started ;)

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