Udacity and the future of online universities

http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2012/01/23/udacity-and-the-future-of-online-universities/

by iamabhi9 • 15 years ago

314 69 15 years ago

blogs.reuters.com

iamabhi94• 15 years ago

http://robots.stanford.edu/

jasonMalcolmHz6• 15 years ago

This link is down

cache available by robots.stanford

waterlesscloud• 15 years ago

I wonder if his departure has anything to do with the delay of the other courses? Maybe he took some students/staff/resources with him that were key to the infrastructure?

amirmc2• 15 years ago

The other courses (i.e ML and DB) seemed to have a different arrangement. The slew of new classes seemed to be following the same arrangement as ML/DB rather than AI.

iamabhi94• 15 years ago

Though as far as I know there was this idea of using Aiqus as the discussion forum platform for all the courses, rather than each course having its own separate forum. Aiqus was used by AI class during last session.

Although I am not aware who was behind the development and operation of Aiqus.

mtrn2• 15 years ago

Took the AI class and it was just amazing. I never had a professor more passionate (yet still rational :) about a subject.

Even though the course made the math and the background sound simple, it wasn't. There is a probably thin line between breaking-down things into a set of well-partitioned and easy to understand statements and oversimplifying really complex systems.

Also, the applications (edge detectors, robotic cars, particle filter based localizations, ...) kept me very motivated throughout the course.

iamabhi94• 15 years ago

Totally agreed. Prof. Thrun and Prof. Norvig made math an interesting part of the course. At the end of the course I found myself more motivated to learn mathematics than ever before.

mtrn2• 15 years ago

Yes, and on a related note: Today morning I skimmed the preface to Computational Science and Engineering by Gilbert Strang, and he also states, that (at least some) math should be thought alongside applications and algorithms, which, since these used to be intense topics, have been traditionally separated by academic curricula.

AI class was a perfect example of that interleaved approach, I think.

riffraff2• 15 years ago

having taken all three classes (AI, DB, ML), I have to point out that in my opinion (and that of other people I spoke with) ai-class was _by far_ the worsely organized, passion of the teachers notwithstanding.

But I am sure Know Labs learned a lot from it and they can only improve.

LaGrange• 15 years ago

The website itself sucked, the quizzes weren't very usable, but the videos themselves were wonderful — in my opinion the best. And I wouldn't be surprised if that was the part that's hardest to improve on, and also the most important one.

jasonMalcolmHz6• 15 years ago

I think some of the frustration may be due to Thrun and Norvig style of asking questions he has not yet fully explained and requiring mental leaps.

This seems uncomfortable at first and getting things wrong is hard to bear in the short term.

On the flipside a better and more long lasting understanding is gained from working things out rather than just learning facts.

If they had waited till it was perfect perhaps it would never have happened, teach early, teach often.

scorpion0322• 15 years ago

Which one is the best?

ramanujan• 15 years ago

Part of the backstory here is that ai-class.com is by Udacity (Sebastian Thrun), while ml-class.org and pgm-class.org are by Coursera (Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller). Formerly colleagues from the same department, now competitors with very similar education startups, all the way down to the naming conventions. Lot of fur flying about who copied who.

Coursera has been launching a ton of classes[1]. Probably Sebastian feels that to beat Andrew and Daphne, he has to go full time.

[1] http://www.cs101-class.org/hub.php

aseembehl• 15 years ago

Could you please elaborate on how you reached such an interesting reasoning behind the launch of these classes.

unignorant• 15 years ago

I can confirm that his reasoning is correct. The word on the street is that Sebastian alienated the powers-that-be at Stanford.

plinkplonk• 15 years ago

" Formerly colleagues from the same department, now competitors with very similar education startups"

(Without taking sides, and somewhat tangentially) if true, we consumers are in for a good time. Competition,especially with such formidable people leading rival companies, is awesome.

gallamine2• 15 years ago

So, does this explain the unexpected delay of the Spring ML-Class? I haven't heard any news until a few days ago when I got an email saying there were delays in starting the new semester.

dangoldin• 15 years ago

I'm interested in this question too. Two of my classes both sent the same type of email. I'd be very surprised if these aren't related.

jasonMalcolmHz6• 15 years ago

Thrun's pages at Stanford robots.stanford.edu has been taken offline.

Google caches are available by searching robots.stanford.

Somethings up anyhoo.

I hope this will not affect future classes by Stanford professors, I am so looking forward to professor Koller's Probabalistic Graphical Models.

scorpion0322• 15 years ago

Neither of them seem to have a collaboration with iTunes U. That is going to be where a big chunk of page views come from, and I guess Apple even manages the streaming infrastructure for it.

Fiordiligi• 14 years ago

you mean Coursera is founded by Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller? well that means Stanford picked Coursera over Udacity, all their other online courses due to start are on Coursera. Andrew Ng is also the Director of their AI lab, pretty unusual for someone who isn't a full professor yet.

ap22213• 15 years ago

I hope this is just a first step toward big future ideas.

Many highly sought professors already have great brands, and I'm surprised that they are so highly underpaid for what they do. Many of them could be getting paid a lot more in scale. Further, they could also be providing value-add services to directly validate some of the best on-line students and grant certifications of expertise. Think of the mozilla badge model [1]. There are hundreds of ways to spin out revenue and scale that model.

[1] https://wiki.mozilla.org/Badges/About

justnearme2• 15 years ago

The average salary of a professor at Stanford is $148,000. I think it's unfortunate that he had to step away from the possibility of influencing those who do make it to Stanford in favor of catering to the world. It's great that he does so, but there's also plenty of reasons why he would be affecting many different minds at Stanford.

[1] http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/05/14/...

sown2• 15 years ago

I think Stanford is more for keeping things closer to the status quo. Students in seats is how they make their money, after all. Not to say that they won't make courses online. I think they would be more than happy to charge $5,000 like they do through SCPD. However, if this develops the way I think it does, the economies of scale have to take over, right, especially after reading about Professor Norvig's discussion last month (http://remotelearningproject.com/interviews/peter-norvig/) about potential business models that try to keep it mostly free.

I'm very excited.

PS: I've noted that the PGM course website says it'll start in Feburary.

klipt• 15 years ago

> the economies of scale have to take over, right

Assuming there's enough competition, yes.

melling• 15 years ago

What happens to the self-driving car? That was his life's dream.

AdamTReineke• 15 years ago

In a few years, he'll teach a class on that too and... mission accomplished! ;-)

nluqo• 15 years ago

Not in a few years, but in one month:

CS 373: Programming a Robotic Car http://youtu.be/aI8SQCEUYrg

silverlake• 15 years ago

It looks like Khan Academy for college-level, semester long classes. He should target the University of Phoenix's crappy online program. Their parent company, the Apollo Group, has a market cap of $7B. Thrun could easily take a huge bite out of that.

etrain• 15 years ago

While I agree that a new education startup could go after something like the University of Phoenix, I'm not sure that Thrun and his crew are going for that.

To me, the University of Phoenix represents a credential factory. People see that all the jobs they want require a college degree, and so they go the easiest route to get that. I don't believe that University of Phoenix (or most of the other big for-profit names) have a strong interest in educating people, nor do I think that their customers are really interested in getting an education - instead they're interested in getting a piece of paper that says they're qualified to do the job they want.

Thrun seems to have far more noble, though possibly less profitable, goals in mind.

jeffreymcmanus• 15 years ago

Not with one class and no accreditation, he won't. UOP is the largest private educator in the US with more than 400,000 paid students. Setting aside the fact that a single online class is nothing close to a "University", he's got a long way to go before he can make a dent in the #1 company in the industry.

andreyf• 15 years ago

The actual website is here: http://www.udacity.com/

For those interested, looks like they're offering two classes (CS101: Building a Search Engine and CS373: Programming a Robotic Car) starting in February and hiring actively, as well (http://www.udacity.com/jobs).

pheaduch• 15 years ago

Anyone else having issues signing up to the classes?

jasonMalcolmHz6• 15 years ago

I managed to sign up. (browser Chrome)

pelemele• 15 years ago

Me. It does nothing when I click on Enroll button.

jasonMalcolmHz6• 15 years ago

Since doing the online AI course, I have been hoping Thrun would teach Robotics.

I have signed up - woohoo. It looks awesome - I am stoked - Sebastian Thrun is an amazing teacher, he really makes me think hard and gives me the scaffolding to investigate further on my own.

dhawalhs3• 15 years ago

I have built something to keep track of all these courses http://www.class-central.com. Currently tracking just Coursera(Stanford's online learning initiative) courses, but would be adding UDACITY and MITx courses(when they are announced) soon.

nik_0_0• 15 years ago

That looks very useful, thank you! I've signed up for a bunch of these courses, but no emails have come in yet and even the websites themselves aren't very connected, let alone the ones on different frameworks.

freshfey• 15 years ago

Hi! We built http://www.skillpunch.com about two weeks ago and it looks like we're going into a similar direction. :) Emailed you!

iusable• 15 years ago

Just went through your site - instant bookmark!

Great work collecting it. I would do some user-tests on the landing page though. It needs a tiny bit more content and a clearer 'best path' call-to-action.

jfriedly• 15 years ago

Thanks for this, keeping track of them all in my Google Calendar was just cluttering it up and hadn't provided any benefit yet. One typo:

Summary of Stanford's online course offerings(not affiliated with Stanford)

should be:

Summary of Stanford's online course offerings (not affiliated with Stanford)

dhawalhs3• 15 years ago

Thanks! Updated.

adambyrtek• 15 years ago

It would be great if you could provide a RSS feed with course announcements.

dhawalhs3• 15 years ago

The Facebook page has an option to get posts as RSS feeds. Here is the link : https://www.facebook.com/feeds/page.php?id=305891199451158&#....

michaelll• 15 years ago

A friend of mine maintains a list, with an Atom feed. By no means official: http://johanneshoff.com/stanford-courses/

johnohara• 15 years ago

It all comes down to certifying student proficiency (course credit).

Udacity and Coursera are not really competitors in the area of course content. They are competitors in the area of student certification. In the reputation behind the process. Meaning rigorous final exams, independently administered, suitable for inclusion on curricula vitae, etc.

By offering courses for free, Udacity and Coursera compete directly with Stanford. But Stanford can compete with them just as well, by allowing students to enroll in the free classes, mentoring them, and then offering their own certification exams -- for credit.

My guess is they won't do that. They'll just find someone else to teach the course. But I bet in the future they intend to keep a very close eye on the department.

johngalt• 15 years ago

Prof. Thrun is an amazing teacher, but I think the 160,000 student sign-ups were due to the Stanford affiliation. Giving up that affiliation will cut enrollement sharply. Any likely business model will cause another sharp decline in enrollment. Thrun has all the right ideas, but on his own it will be tough to execute.

Education is ripe for disruption. Thrun+Ng+Norvig+Stanford as a cohesive team could have made a history altering change in education. It's unfortunate that they aren't a team.

lazerwalker• 15 years ago

What I find problematic about all of these new online education startups (Udacity, Khan Academy, etc) is that they tackle the problem by simply providing online equivalents to traditional didactic learning methods like lectures and textbooks.

A professor standing in front of a group of students lecturing is definitely easy for the professor and cost-efficient to scale up to larger class sizes, but that's just not how a lot of students learn. I'd wager that most HNers learned programming through actually writing code, even those who learned CS through a formal program. In the humanities, I'd argue that the most effective way to learn is through small discussion groups, not a distinguished professor explaining literature or philosophical works to you. Just throwing that up on the internet is an easy way to expand your audience, but providing higher-quality educational materials doesn't do anything to improve the quality of how we educate.

The internet has a lot of potential to improve the quality of education, and there are tons of awesome startups working on it (companies like Codecademy and Coursekit come to mind), but I personally hope the future of online education doesn't look too much like Udacity.

aik2• 15 years ago

I agree, but it does provide value beyond a simple real-life lecture, most notably the fact that you can go at your own pace and rewind/replay at any point. This is huge. In addition, the lectures are much shorter for the most part, which also makes a significant difference.

Concerning the importance of discussion groups, face-to-face interaction, and networking opportunities -- those things are necessary in certain cases, but not all. The courses currently being offered through these sites are most often the ones that don't necessary benefit hugely from these real-life components.

mephitix• 15 years ago

I don't think they're discouraging the self-discovery component of education. Even Khan Academy's holistic model seems to treat his videos as just the bare-bones - the site encourages lots of practicing on the website and projects. The ML class encouraged coding projects, and Khan Academy's "schools" in CA involved inverting classrooms such that projects and self-discovery was performed in the class while the bite-size lectures were studied outside of class.

ilamont• 15 years ago

Relevant to this article is a blog post written by a Stanford Student taking the machine learning class:

http://pennyhacks.com/2011/12/28/stanford-free-classes-a-rev...

HN discussion here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3399976

justnearme2• 15 years ago

Also if I may make a shameless plug for mine:

http://www.rioleo.org/a-reflection-on-stanfords-ai-class-db-...

Ironic, I just posted this 3 days ago.

Udacity and the future of online universities

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