Sebastian Thrun Steps Down as Udacity's CEO (opens in new tab)

As a current Georgia Tech student doing the Online Master's in CS, I wonder this too because it's the primary method of delivery for lectures.

For the most part, I'm not crazy about the Udacity platform and the lectures (they're too short, the mini-quizzes aren't always that great, and the platform doesn't feel like it has been improving in the past 2 years). However, all the value and learning is coming from the interactions with other students/TAs/professors on Piazza as well as the assignments/projects we do.

If you were to ask me how I would rate each component independently, I would say that Udacity is the weakest part of the experience.

(edX employee here)

I'm not particular privy to whatever tactical insight our leadership has on Udacity, Coursera, etc... but I can tell you where edX is looking to head as a MOOC when it comes to college/university partnerships.

We have our partner-developed content. This is stuff like Harvard's CS50, MIT's 6.00.1x, etc. High quality content. People are very eager to take the courses -- they're developed by professors, TAs, etc, from these schools, and, to be honest, there's a lot of front-loaded name recognition -- but there's also a good chunk of learners who go on to pay for a verified certificate. On the flipside, we've talked to major businesses (tens of thousands of employees) who say they're willing to treat these certificates, the output of these courses, in line with their campus equivalents. That's pretty huge for someone looking to beef up their resume.

The next evolution of what we're doing by partnering with these institutions are things like Arizona State University's Global Freshman Academy or MIT's MicroMasters. ASU's Global Freshman Academy is taking your entire "freshman" year on edX, and getting real credit from it. MIT's MicroMasters (in Supply Chain Management) is taking a semester online, which makes you eligible for taking the rest of the degree (which is two semesters total) on campus. These cost money; they aren't entirely free like the standard courses on edX. However, they're deeply discounted and this is what our learners say they want.

Many people want credentials, they want them from top colleges and universities, and they want them targeted to specific fields. Ultimately, these people just don't feel confident figuring out which courses to take, and they want to be told which courses to take to get them to a specific place: better comprehension of X, better chances of job in a given field, etc. This is what is precipitating a lot of the advent of the specializations/nanodegrees, as you say.

(sorry, a little long-winded)

I feel somewhat the same. I took a couple Udacity courses that were great and quite a few from Coursera. Coursera's free offerings are now partially gutted by restricting non-paying students from taking tests and submitting assignments.

I believe the failure was a reference to the failed partnership with San Jose state.. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/07/18/citing-disapp...

The main problem is that great courses require great faculty to create and manage them semester by semester. Udacity and the like are built on the premise that we can scale up a professor's reach by orders of magnitude. But you can't do that without losing quality. The state of online course software is such that in most cases it's a hindrance, rather than a help. Software should make our jobs easier, but for professors building an online course versus building a traditional lecture/paper/chalkboard sort of course, technology far too often gets in the way and makes their jobs harder.

They need to make money? We should be thankful they haven't resorted to advertising or selling our information.

I feel it's a failed graft. MOOC cannot play nice enough with current education system without causing too much interferences, hence the no parternships.

The specializations and nanodegrees sell brand, and perhaps motivation. (I am more likely to complete what I have paid for and can brag about)

But "accessibility issues" could completely change the way people learn. What if each student could access the kind of instruction one gets at Philips Exeter or Princeton University?

Or what if the tailored aspect of private instruction could be scaled up? For example, if you give a tough math problem to 1,000,000 students, and want to have a tutor walk them through the problem, you'd need to have 1,000,000 tutors. But there are probably only 20 types of mistake one can make on a given math problem. So if you had a "choose your own adventure" solution, one math teacher could, in a month, record lessons that reach a hundred million students at a personalized level.

Or, one could make a cost-effective way to learn from the absolute top practitioners in a field. Most people cannot afford private basketball lessons with an NBA basketball coach, for example. But let's say such a coach watched 10,000 people play basketball for five minutes each, and recorded five minutes of feedback for each person (about one year of full-time work). Then, you could upload a video of you playing, you could algorithmically analyze the user's playing style, and match them to the person in the set of 10,000 that matches them best. The five minutes of feedback might be really useful to that person, and can be delivered at scale.

It depends on how you look at it. Thanks to Wikipedia (this was back in 2002-2006) I was able to bypass the problem that half of my university lecturers were researchers first, and teachers a distant second.

Key computer science concepts went from being incomprehensible to being remarkably easy, and I didn't need to spend a small fortune on textbooks either. So to some extent, a revolution has already happened.

Accessibility definitely, but I think it's naive to assume that just because the centralized teacher-student model of education has been around for a long time necessarily means it will never be supplanted.

I think the evolution of education is probably technology supporting traditional teaching, along with some way of easily varying the curriculum or the learning mode to accommodate different learning styles.

For that to happen I would guess that making designing curricula, lesson plans and activities easier to do would be a good start.

Agree, technology will (and already has to some extent) revolutionize learning on your own, but there still is a lot of value in going to a class, learning together with real people and listening to an experienced teacher. It is kind of similar as to why virtual meetings will never fully supplant real life meetings. Our mind just reacts differently in real conversations and i think peer pressure actually makes some sense in a learning environment. It's similar to how i feel about working at home after years of doing it and now working in an office again. It's just a different feeling of commitment to a project.

Real gains in educational technology will come from mediating in-person social interactions (focused on knowledge building rather than general purpose interactions, of course).

In many instances, the teacher actually knows what should be done to improve the learning of a student - but is logistically constrained from providing that level of service (Bloom's 2 sigma problem). The low hanging fruit is removing those constraints.

We will need better tools for understanding the knowledge/abilities of our students in a much more refined manner.

"The only thing that a 1850's person would recognize today are our schools. Why?" -@nolanbushnell

I think just about everyone would be delighted if recorded lectures completely replace traditional giant lectures.

But I agree, there's much more to the structure of education that technology can help with, but not supplant. Universities aren't going away (or radically changing) any time soon.

Maybe they could've focussed on making the credentials valuable (maybe they did and it didn't work). AFAIK, if you told an employer you have a "nanodegree" in something or other, its glossed over.

Usually, you have to back it up with real-world projects. In which case why would I pay for the degree, I should just go out and build something with the stuff I learn for free.

What about current college students?

If it were possible for a good student at _any_ school to take online courses _for credit_ at an Ivy, and perhaps to even work toward a new "dual" degree that joins both institutions, I suspect the demand would be there. They're already using borrowed money.

A bit too cynical, I think. This kind of arrangement, where one of the cofounders steps down to let someone else run the company, is very very common. Especially when the person stepping down is more technical/scientific. Remember that Thrun used to be a professor and used to do/lead research at Google.

I disagree, I'd say it means there's too much day to day running of the org that their key people aren't able to focus on the longer term. That's pretty common.

Except that Thrun has a pretty good track record so far.

So maybe it's not that learning online is a better method but that you found better teaching material and online is obviously a easier method to do so?

It's interesting that the HN community thinks this comment should be downvoted. There's nothing wrong with it in any way.