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Udacity and the future of online universities
- iamabhi9 15y agohttp://robots.stanford.edu/ http://robots.stanford.edu/
- jasonMalcolmHz 15y agoThis link is down cache available by robots.stanford
- waterlesscloud 15y agoI 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?
- amirmc 15y agoThe 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.
- iamabhi9 15y agoThough 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.
- amirmc 15y ago> there was this idea of using Aiqus as the discussion forum platform for all the courses Not sure if you're referring to the current bunch of courses or the first three (AI/ML/DB). I'm assuming it's the latter. Aiqus was only used for the AI class. IIRC it was set up independently but someone before the course began and ended up being the pseudo-official Q&A forum (linked to from the main site).
- iamabhi9 15y agook, I was not aware that Aiqus was independent of the AI class. Though one of the developers of Aiqus posted in an unofficial FB group of AI class that all the rest of the courses will also use Aiqus during the next session.
- streptomycin 15y agoInteresting that they seem to have tried to sell Aiqus recently.. https://flippa.com/2673719-q-a-site-on-artificial-intelligence-with-approx-1-million-pageviews-last-month https://flippa.com/2673719-q-a-site-on-artificial-intelligen...
- mtrn 15y agoTook 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.
- iamabhi9 15y agoTotally 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.
- mtrn 15y agoYes, 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.
- riffraff 15y agohaving 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 15y agoThe 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.
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- ramanujan 15y agoPart 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 http://www.cs101-class.org/hub.php
- aseembehl 15y agoCould you please elaborate on how you reached such an interesting reasoning behind the launch of these classes.
- unignorant 15y agoI can confirm that his reasoning is correct. The word on the street is that Sebastian alienated the powers-that-be at Stanford.
- sown 15y agoThat's too bad...for Stanford. It must have been a somewhat serious fight.
- stanfordstud 15y agoHow did this happen - did he want to push online education in different directions? Did he want to pursue more overtly commercial interests than his counterparts, which seem to be approaching it from a nonprofit sense? Was there a personal falling out between Andrew Ng and Sebastian Thrun? The non-profit focused alternative seems to currently have both a better platform and more participation. Can a lesser amount of potential revenue allow this to scale up? Or will professor's be drawn by the larger salaries commercial teaching organizations could command, coupled with more extensive and rapid feature deployment?
- iandanforth 15y ago
- ap22213 15y agoI 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 https://wiki.mozilla.org/Badges/About
- justnearme 15y agoThe 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/MNGEKIRLKU1.DTL http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/05/14/...
- sown 15y agoI 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/ 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 15y ago> the economies of scale have to take over, right Assuming there's enough competition, yes.
- melling 15y agoWhat happens to the self-driving car? That was his life's dream.
- AdamTReineke 15y agoIn a few years, he'll teach a class on that too and... mission accomplished! ;-)
- nluqo 15y agoNot in a few years, but in one month: CS 373: Programming a Robotic Car http://youtu.be/aI8SQCEUYrg http://youtu.be/aI8SQCEUYrg
- silverlake 15y agoIt 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 15y agoWhile 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 15y agoNot 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 15y agoThe actual website is here: http://www.udacity.com/ 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 http://www.udacity.com/jobs).
- pheaduch 15y agoAnyone else having issues signing up to the classes?
- jasonMalcolmHz 15y agoI managed to sign up. (browser Chrome)
- maxgaudin 15y agoCan't enroll with Chrome or Firefox. Their site is all kinds of broken right now.
- jasonMalcolmHz 15y agoI enrolled with Chrome 7.0.517.44 on Ubuntu 10.04 from the UK no problem.
- pelemele 15y agoMe. It does nothing when I click on Enroll button.
- jasonMalcolmHz 15y agoSince 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.
- dhawalhs 15y agoI have built something to keep track of all these courses http://www.class-central.com 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 15y agoThat 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 15y agoHi! We built http://www.skillpunch.com http://www.skillpunch.com about two weeks ago and it looks like we're going into a similar direction. :) Emailed you!
- iusable 15y agoJust 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 15y agoThanks 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)
- dhawalhs 15y agoThanks! Updated.
- adambyrtek 15y agoIt would be great if you could provide a RSS feed with course announcements.
- johnohara 15y agoIt 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 15y agoProf. 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 15y agoWhat 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.
- aik 15y agoI 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 15y agoI 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 15y agoRelevant 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-review-from-a-stanford-student/ http://pennyhacks.com/2011/12/28/stanford-free-classes-a-rev... HN discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3399976 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3399976
- justnearme 15y agoAlso if I may make a shameless plug for mine: http://www.rioleo.org/a-reflection-on-stanfords-ai-class-db-class.php http://www.rioleo.org/a-reflection-on-stanfords-ai-class-db-... Ironic, I just posted this 3 days ago.
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