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Sebastian Thrun Steps Down as Udacity's CEO

fortune.com

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Re: Sebastian Thrun Steps Down as Udacity's CEO

#31

Post by threesixandnine »

gedrap wrote: post #25
uulbiy wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the big mistake was offering something for free and then asking money for it. The first backlash was with the (unverified) certificates and the latest with the tests and assignments. It might have been a different story if they announced from the beginning that they are only offering their services for free for a certain period of time. They focused on gaining users and they succeeded on that, but now that th…

I think it's just basic human psychology that once you have access to something, you start feeling entitled to it. However, in reality, Coursera (or any other company) is under no obligation to keep providing free stuff. It's natural that you are losing users once you start asking for money, it's just impossible to have it otherwise. Let's not forget that Coursera is a business so they obviously need to generate some…

I do agree with you that we sometimes feel entitled to something and we shouldn't. However, I remember when Udacity started and it was all ah, yes, oh, uh, free courses, free education, access for everyone.

Charge for it but don't try and fool me with "I am nice and doing good" talk.

Re: Sebastian Thrun Steps Down as Udacity's CEO

#32

Post by TeMPOraL »

threesixandnine wrote: post #31
gedrap wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's just basic human psychology that once you have access to something, you start feeling entitled to it. However, in reality, Coursera (or any other company) is under no obligation to keep providing free stuff. It's natural that you are losing users once you start asking for money, it's just impossible to have it otherwise. Let's not forget that Coursera is a business so they obviously need to generate some…

I do agree with you that we sometimes feel entitled to something and we shouldn't. However, I remember when Udacity started and it was all ah, yes, oh, uh, free courses, free education, access for everyone. Charge for it but don't try and fool me with "I am nice and doing good" talk.

Yeah and especially Coursera is still waving the banner of "free education for everyone" (and asking to pay to support it...) while employing more and more dark patterns to prevent you from getting viewing the for free.

Re: Sebastian Thrun Steps Down as Udacity's CEO

#33

Post by thaumasiotes »

qq66 wrote: post #29
kumarski wrote: post #20

I don't think technology will revolutionize education the way everyone in Silicon Valley thinks it will. Accessibility issues, yes. Disrupting traditional teaching, learning, practicing....hmmm?

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. B…

> 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.

Not quite. There may be 20 different types of mistake you could make on the problem (I would make a lower estimate, personally), but you can make them in several different places, and the influence of a mistake will be felt in the rest of the problem.

Udacity deals with this currently by never assigning complicated problems that might see a mistake in one step show up in a later step; this isn't quite ideal as instruction, but it makes it possible to automate handling the assignments.

Some relevant cartoons:

http://spikedmath.com/240.html

http://smbc-comics.com/index.php?id=3011

Re: Sebastian Thrun Steps Down as Udacity's CEO

#34

Post by detaro »

qq66 wrote: post #29
kumarski wrote: post #20

I don't think technology will revolutionize education the way everyone in Silicon Valley thinks it will. Accessibility issues, yes. Disrupting traditional teaching, learning, practicing....hmmm?

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. B…

I'm not sure math is a good example, but for grading small code exercises there are systems that map "equivalent" solutions on each other, ignoring whitespace/variable names/simple equivalent operations. This allows the tutors to spend more energy on the long tail of "strange" solutions which needs more individual attention.

Re: Sebastian Thrun Steps Down as Udacity's CEO

#35

Post by TeMPOraL »

gedrap wrote: post #25
uulbiy wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the big mistake was offering something for free and then asking money for it. The first backlash was with the (unverified) certificates and the latest with the tests and assignments. It might have been a different story if they announced from the beginning that they are only offering their services for free for a certain period of time. They focused on gaining users and they succeeded on that, but now that th…

I think it's just basic human psychology that once you have access to something, you start feeling entitled to it. However, in reality, Coursera (or any other company) is under no obligation to keep providing free stuff. It's natural that you are losing users once you start asking for money, it's just impossible to have it otherwise. Let's not forget that Coursera is a business so they obviously need to generate some…

> I think it's just basic human psychology that once you have access to something, you start feeling entitled to it.

I don't think that's true. People don't seem to feel that entitled in the "analog" world. But the digital technology changes the equation, and frankly, I think our "lizard brain" is right on this one.

The marginal cost of producing another copy of digitally encoded product is essentially zero, and it requires zero specialist knowledge. Copying binary data is what computers are made for, it's their basic function. Plus, the Internet lets you scale a digital business to the whole world for (almost) free. Honestly, what feels entitled is expecting that one should be able to scale their business by orders of magnitude while retaining the price.

(And in general, charging for copying data feels a lot like charging for air, but that's another topic.)

But regardless, Coursera is really playing fast and loose with their credibility. It used to be that it was the place you could go to get a decent education on some topic for free, at any time and in your own pace. What it (and other sites like it) turned into is a money-making machine. You get forced to follow a particular schedule ("yadda yadda people can't learn if they're not forced"), the course materials are often available only during the particular time window and disappear as soon as the course ends, and now they're also employing a lot of dark patterns to make sure you can't even find the free courses. All that while talking how their mission is to bring accessible education to the world. Bullshit. They're just making money because media wrote a lot about them and made them look hot.

You know how real revolution in education looks like? It looks like this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11561770 - the original article + the comment thread + the links in that comment thread.

Re: Sebastian Thrun Steps Down as Udacity's CEO

#36

Post by jnbiche »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #32
threesixandnine wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do agree with you that we sometimes feel entitled to something and we shouldn't. However, I remember when Udacity started and it was all ah, yes, oh, uh, free courses, free education, access for everyone. Charge for it but don't try and fool me with "I am nice and doing good" talk.

Yeah and especially Coursera is still waving the banner of "free education for everyone" (and asking to pay to support it...) while employing more and more dark patterns to prevent you from getting viewing the for free.

Meanwhile, Khan Academy, who really does believe in free education for everyone, is getting better and better...

Re: Sebastian Thrun Steps Down as Udacity's CEO

#37

Post by TeMPOraL »

jnbiche wrote: post #36
TeMPOraL wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah and especially Coursera is still waving the banner of "free education for everyone" (and asking to pay to support it...) while employing more and more dark patterns to prevent you from getting viewing the for free.

Meanwhile, Khan Academy, who really does believe in free education for everyone, is getting better and better...

It looks like they're slowly succumbing too :(. It took me over a minute now to figure out how to get to the videos without having to register first - their new site design makes it much harder than it was when Khan Academy was "just a site". I hope they won't go further in that direction.

Re: Sebastian Thrun Steps Down as Udacity's CEO

#38

Post by andrewingram »

kumarski wrote: post #20

I don't think technology will revolutionize education the way everyone in Silicon Valley thinks it will. Accessibility issues, yes. Disrupting traditional teaching, learning, practicing....hmmm?

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.

Re: Sebastian Thrun Steps Down as Udacity's CEO

#39

Post by aashu_dwivedi »

canistr wrote: post #14
Artoemius wrote: post #5

I wonder what is hidden behind the phrase "the college partnerships failed". I took some great courses on Udacity, Coursera, and edX back in the days when they regularly offered amazing comprehensive college courses for free. They do still offer free courses. However, it seems that the atmosphere of free accessible education is somehow lost, with the advent of the "specializations" and "nanodegrees" and the like. Or…

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 int…

Another omscs student here. I feel that the udacity has played a big role in keeping the quality of omscs high.

Yes it's the professors who create great courses but the post production part of udacity is also a big factor in keeping the quality high on the courses.

Re: Sebastian Thrun Steps Down as Udacity's CEO

#40

Post by gedrap »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #35
gedrap wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's just basic human psychology that once you have access to something, you start feeling entitled to it. However, in reality, Coursera (or any other company) is under no obligation to keep providing free stuff. It's natural that you are losing users once you start asking for money, it's just impossible to have it otherwise. Let's not forget that Coursera is a business so they obviously need to generate some…

> I think it's just basic human psychology that once you have access to something, you start feeling entitled to it. I don't think that's true. People don't seem to feel that entitled in the "analog" world. But the digital technology changes the equation, and frankly, I think our "lizard brain" is right on this one. The marginal cost of producing another copy of digitally encoded product is essentially zero, and it r…

>>> The marginal cost of producing another copy of digitally encoded product is essentially zero, and it requires zero specialist knowledge. Copying binary data is what computers are made for, it's their basic function. Plus, the Internet lets you scale a digital business to the whole world for (almost) free. Honestly, what feels entitled is expecting that one should be able to scale their business by orders of magnitude while retaining the price.

Well, it can be said about most of the SaaS companies but that's not how business works. If it doesn't cost you anything to produce, then you should give it away for free might look great at first sight but it's not that great in reality. So if the business is just giving away the product for free, why would someone pay for that? You might say extra features, etc. But they are free to distribute as well!

If we apply this to the physical products, you can equally say that the companies shouldn't charge more than it costs to produce something. But if all companies worked this way, that would take us back to the stone age pretty quickly.

Money motivates people, motivate people produce goods.

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