Thrun pivots Udacity toward vocational education (opens in new tab)

I fiercely applaud Thrun's update on the uncomfortable evidence he gathered, and wish him the best in his pivot.

(It still seems to me that MOOC's might be done right with enough effort, like spending $100K per hour of nationwide-reproduced instruction the same we do as with TV, but I have not been keeping up with the literature here and perhaps I don't know how pessimistic I should be.)

The key quote from this article is right here:

"I think Thrun's elite background led him down a garden path. Any San Jose State professor who had taught an introduction to statistics could have told him that many (most?) of his students would not have basic arithmetic skills and would "hate math." They are not Stanford students."

Thrun is an elite academic. He has most likely never even attended a university that had to teach remedial math courses, let alone taken or taught one. Thus, by extension, he has likely never had to deal with students who had anything but excellent preparation for studying the material he was teaching.

I sat through most of Thrun's AI lectures and I felt that he and Norvig were questionable teachers. They are clearly brilliant men, and their excitement was contagious. They would be tremendous guest-lecturers in any CS course (the particle filter lectures were Thrun's best because he was so excited, but he spent most of his time gushing about how cool the ideas were). But as far as teaching a course to non-Stanford students without the help of an army of TAs, they were uninspired.

Compare Thrun's experience with the sentiments in this article about Miami University in Ohio: http://www.propublica.org/article/on-country-club-campuses-a...

The common vein is that education is fairly easy when the people you are educating are well-prepared and generally hail from the upper half of the socioeconomic spectrum.

Teaching poor kids, and kids who, for other reasons do not have adequate preparation is really something of a Sisyphean task. The problem is not in our schools, and it can't be fixed by fiddling with the curriculum or delivery method, it can only be truly fixed by fixing the underlying social problems, but that usually means talking about sticky issues like racism, sexism, ethno-centrism, and capitalism itself.

This isn't surprising, really. MOOCs disproportionately benefit those who already have the means, the background, and most importantly the drive to learn.

The greatest challenge of education is to nurture the desire for learning in students and for students to be in a situation in life (e.g. situation at home - income, safety, etc) in order to even have a chance at becoming motivated.

MOOCs address the problem of access. But access wasn't the main problem to begin with for the vast majority of students whom people like Thurn was trying to reach.

Did anyone take Thrun's basic stats course? Is it the same one that Udacity offered to the public? I'm bothered by this paragraph: "I think Thrun's elite background led him down a garden path. Any San Jose State professor who had taught an introduction to statistics could have told him that many (most?) of his students would not have basic arithmetic skills and would "hate math." They are not Stanford students."

San Jose State is a reputable university with many graduates doing well in the valley. The statement that "many of his students would not have basic arithmetic skills" sounds shocking.

The article makes it sound like he gave up real quick. That he wrote class materials at a level above where the actual students were and instead of adjusting to their level for the next semester, he just threw up his hands in frustration.

Is there more to the story?

Pity. The only MOOC I have ever finished, and truly enjoyed, was Thrun's "Artificial Intelligence for Robotics". It was magnificent to get an easy to follow introduction into a deep academic field by someone who is so demonstrably accomplished.

I know that I'm just being selfish here, but I was hoping that Udacity will continue on that path. I would love to learn celestial mechanics from Belbruno, or neural networks from Hinton, or operation system design from Linus in the accesible Udacity style. It seems that won't happen any time soon, or ever.

Isn't this just them trying to monetize online classes? I've read a few other articles that covered this topic and it seemed he was pivoting away from "education should be free" to wanting paid offerings. I know he has, along with others, complained about the limited number of people completing courses or passing them. I just feel like that's an excuse. I looked over a number over courses but didn't complete them because they were boring, lacked necessary prerequisites or had a poor user experience. I think it's a little early for giving up and I hope something takes free online education seriously enough to solve the problems. I'll also mention that not a single person I know outside of the tech industry has even heard of this stuff. You have to at least try a little before you quit, right?

I do not see this as a problem with Thrun, but as a problem with the current educational system. If MOOC's carried a fraction of the "academic credibility" that college degrees did, Udacity would be a home run already. This will require a cultural shift, and companies like Udacity are sowing the seeds.

As Warren Buffet has said, the courses he took at Wharton barely differed in quality from the ones he took at Nebraska. Our culture is so obsessed with shallow accolades that it is slow to recognize a humongous opportunity right underneath its very nose.

There is absolutely no reason that MOOC's cannot teach many college-level courses as good as or better than their real life counterparts. Unfortunately, the motivation of students largely stems from the aforementioned shallow accolades.

As a filtering mechanism for professional skills, I think the current academic system has some flaws which MOOC addresses nicely, perhaps not as a complete replacement, but a powerful complement. But the reality is, academia should be used to filter academics, and in many industries, a degree represents nothing more than 4 years that could have been spent learning the actual profession and adding value to the economy.

Well, all this hype was so overblown and the anti-university jibber jabber has been at fever pitch for some time now. It's nice to see practical thinking rather than breathless "down with universities because Internet" pronouncements.

As an academic I feel no schadenfreude at all. I feel somewhat sad.

This model will work eventually. It's mostly a matter of how the courses are structured and taught. I don't think it'll replace traditional universities but it should challenge the price structures and general lazy-bureaucracy attitude of many of them.

If you look at programming in particular I feel very good about all these online courses. It's easier than ever to teach yourself programming which is a net+ for society. I don't understand how more accessible education for everyone is ever a bad thing.

I don't think it's just education that's broken though. HR is also broken because they mostly look for the signature on the dotted line (oh look someone else has done the vetting for us) and tend to value certification over actual skill. Long term, I hope it'll be enough to list coursera etc. courses, books you read and a github link on your resume. IT should strive to be a leader in this shift because it's generally an industry where self-learners can do extremly well and have traditionally shown it's possible.

This is an interesting shift, but feels less promising than the initial rhetoric. Vocational education in STEM fields delivered by for-profit institutions is already pretty well-trodden ground. ITT Tech, for example, is a large incumbent in this sector. Why should someone go with Udacity instead?

I would be very curious to see numbers for udacity competitors.

I know I gave up every time I tried to do something on udacity while I completed most of the classes I took on coursera, and all the original stanford ones.

I blame this on the interaction between class style and myself being terrible at self management without deadlines.

I mean, I took the original Thrun AI class with a coursera-like model and I did it fine, while I don't know if I got to the 3rd lecture of Thrun's Stats 101.

The "secret sauce" of the MOOC is the on-line community of motivated learners. Can they make this work in industrial training...?

It's a shame Udacity hasn't worked as well as Thrun hoped. I'm convinced that the failure of existing online courses has been primarily a problem of motivation, rather than an inherent pedagogical problem in online coursework. It's very hard to motivate yourself to consistently work on coursework if there are no deadlines and dropping the course just means you keep going with it sometime later. Still, I can't really explain why the SJSU courses failed as well; it sounds like students had actual deadlines, and were "required" to complete the courses to the same degree they're required to complete their regular courses. It's possible that the online tools to ask for help didn't work as well as in-person interaction, or that sitting in front of a computer doing things at random times is less motivating than actually attending lectures in person at regular times. There's one thing I'm certain of, however: it's a huge waste to have universities pay professors (who are selected for their research ability, not teaching skills) to repeatedly lecture the same material to small groups of people. A hybrid model might work best. Lectures could still be online (but possibly at fixed times to prevent procrastination), but they would be supplemented by in-person recitations, where students would meet in small groups with instructors and have the opportunity to ask questions or review particular topics, with the instructor as well as with peers. This model is still far more expensive and less accessible than online courses hoped to be, but it might actually work.

I took the web dev course by the founder of Hipmunk and it was absolutely great!

This was going from "best thing ever" to "lousy idea" in light speed. That is the downside of big ideas if they haven't been validated early. Not only investment of time and resource, but psychological energy. This is really the story of all change. It it unlikely, extremely hard and often at the wrong time.

How is this an inverted classroom if the MOOCs don't have a component where students come in after each class and take a test showing they've mastered the lesson's material? If they don't pass then they have to get remedial correction 1 on 1. Just like in a regular class.

That's what motivates them and pushes them to work. After all habits are hard to form and break. Wanting to learn is not enough, putting in a regular effort to do so is a habit that needs to be coached. That's one of the main jobs of educators for under-motivated students (read: most no grad students). And sorely missing from Udacity.

CONCLUSION: Udacity's "experiment" blatantly omitted a crucial hidden variable.

The problem with this pivot that proper vocational education also requires a fair amount of mathematics and even more tricky for an online course a lot of hands on work.

I started on the professional apprentice track back in the day and our college had two entire blocks filed with machine tools and labs.

I really wish Udacity would clarify their approach going forward. Will their classes become solely vocational, or will they continue to develop conventional courses? It's not either/or.

Thrun should look at the Khan academy.

That said, Udacity can serve a different purpose. And after all, the computer courses there are vocational...

Par for the course. Pioneers, as they say, are the ones with arrows on their backs. The "I told you so" crowd are cowards who would never stick their necks out to try anything new. That, or they have ulterior motives such as job security or income protection.

The truth is online education is here to stay and it will get better with time. It will, eventually, replace big chunks out of traditional education. Probably not all.

My son is currently going through MIT's 6.00.1x Intro to Computer Science and Programming on edX. He is 14 and in High School. Watching him progress from mechanically typing conditional statements to having his mind opened to computational thinking has been an amazing experience. Yes, this course is pushing him around and challenging him in big ways. It isn't easy.

From what I've seen, there are only two ways one could succeed with these kinds of courses: self motivation or external support (or both). In our case he has all of my support. I am actually taking the class alongside him so I can see what and how they are teaching in order to help him out.

Motivation is a huge factor. He is a member of the local FRC robotics team and was involved in FLL before that.

We work on every problem set in a collaborative manner, with me guiding rather than providing solutions as well as simply being there to expand on topics that are not covered to a great depth (pointers comes to mind). Lately I've been doing a lot more watching than guiding as he has definitely begun to think like a programmer and is solving most every problem without external help.

For me it's been an interesting review of topics I have not touched in years. Recursion, for example, is something I haven't touched in quite some time as I have not run into problems and systems that could justify the resources required when using these techniques. Playing with recursion in an academic setting and helping my son learn the concept was lots of fun.

I can absolutely see that a course such as 6.00.1x would be impossible to complete for a kid without the support of a parent. Not sure if that parent has to have domain knowledge or not. I can't be a good judge this because I obviously do and all of our conversations have taken advantage of this.

I can also see the difficulties in entering into some of these courses without the necessary preparation. Students who went through school by mechanically doing math without really understanding math tend to not do well on higher level courses regardless of whether these courses are online or in person.

There's also the case of the working engineer who might need to brush-up on skills before attempting a class. Using myself as an example, I have not used statistics in any formal way in a long time. If I wanted to take an online ML class I'd have to spend an amount of time reviewing statistics and probably a couple of other areas in Calculus.

In this sense this is where, perhaps, MOOC's do it wrong. Conventional live courses go through a qualification phase in order to ensure that the "herd" has reasonably uniform and adequate capabilities. The beauty of MOOC's is that anyone can jump in. And that's absolutely fantastic. What might be lacking is a departure from a linear model of teaching. Why can't I enroll in that ML class and, when and as required, take off in a branch and review statistics to then come back and "merge" into the main thread of the class. Perhaps this non-linear approach is what is missing.

All MOOC's are pretty much online versions of some kind of a traditional live class. Lectures, problems, homework, tests. All presented in a linear timescale and on a similarly linear schedule. A learning system that is truly after the acquisition of knowledge must work differently. It must take a highly interactive approach in which the teaching system is flexible enough to, effectively, deliver curriculum that is customized to the needs of each and every person.

This is a challenge. We have to be glad there are people like Thurn who are willing to stick their necks out, try, fail and try again. The critics are usually people who will never compromise their station in life to try and drive progress. They don't want arrows in their backs. Far easier to shoot them at pioneers, eventually you hit one or two of them and for a brief moment in time you might actually sound like you know what you are talking about. Reality, however, is quite different.

What I would tell Thurn is: Don't give up. Don't exit the segment. Try to figure out how to change the approach and make it work.