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Accenture to Acquire Udacity

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Re: Accenture to Acquire Udacity

#11

Post by testfoobar »

beoberha wrote: post #6

This is unfortunate to see. I remember when these alt-Ed startups were all the rage and there was a genuine belief that we were on the cusp of a paradigm shift in how we learned. Would love to hear some success stories if anyone has any!

Learning has changed dramatically. There are incredible YouTube channels on every subject. Open courses are offered by top Universities for free.

What hasn't changed is credentialism. Because knowledge is free, everyone can claim to have it. So the value of a credential has gone up. An actual MIT degree vs classes taken at MIT OpenCourseware is orders of magnitude more significant.

You can learn anything for free now. Proving you've learned it is still heavily gate kept.

Re: Accenture to Acquire Udacity

#12

Post by sizeofchar »

beoberha wrote: post #6

This is unfortunate to see. I remember when these alt-Ed startups were all the rage and there was a genuine belief that we were on the cusp of a paradigm shift in how we learned. Would love to hear some success stories if anyone has any!

I completed the CompSci X-Series of MITx on edX, and Software Engineering for IaaS, from BerkeleyX. They were so awesome that I can only think they phased them out because it was such a bargain. Practically, the courses allowed me to change career and to be well positioned.

Re: Accenture to Acquire Udacity

#13

Post by geodel »

vsnf wrote: post #9
TuringNYC wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> there was a genuine belief that we were on the cusp of a paradigm shift in how we learned Why do you feel that belief has changed? I have used Khan Academy, Coursera, Udacity, OReilly Safari, and Udemy. All are great and each excels in different areas. Many have removed their all-access passes in the past year, but they all cost almost nothing compared to the alternatives. I could only have hoped for such awesome…

They may be good resources but the energy in the air during that time was that they could challenge universities. It is clear with passed time that they didn't, and will not.

Yeah, challenging university system was there. But it turned out really very very few people were motivated enough to finish the whole course to level of completing certificate which were quite cheap.

Most people enrolled to audit tons of courses, caught a few lectures, got bored and moved on.

As with anything that is now present in abundance due to internet curation becomes the key and that is either not cheap or not available in general.

Re: Accenture to Acquire Udacity

#14

Post by iamleppert »

I paid over $1,000 for one of their “nanodegree” programs. After it ended, they had the nerve to lock all the content, including all my notes and submissions as well as course content like videos and such. I highly recommend anyone avoid them.

Re: Accenture to Acquire Udacity

#15

Post by geodel »

TuringNYC wrote: post #7
yen223 wrote: post #2

This definitely wasn't in my 2024 bingo card. What does Accenture (or for that matter Udacity) have to gain from this acquisition?

Accenture has >730,000 employees ( https://newsroom.accenture.com/fact-sheet ) Much of their model is hiring entry-level to junior resources, upskill them, bill them out to clients at high mark-ups. Many parts of the workforce follow an up-or-out mentality and technical/functional upskilling is a key component to this, rather than just tenure. Purchasing a platform to train that many people is probably a bargain comp…

Agree. At Accenture's training budgets level I'd imagine 5-10% of that money could churn out hundreds of new courses per year.

Re: Accenture to Acquire Udacity

#16

Post by rchaud »

testfoobar wrote: post #11
beoberha wrote: post #6

This is unfortunate to see. I remember when these alt-Ed startups were all the rage and there was a genuine belief that we were on the cusp of a paradigm shift in how we learned. Would love to hear some success stories if anyone has any!

Learning has changed dramatically. There are incredible YouTube channels on every subject. Open courses are offered by top Universities for free. What hasn't changed is credentialism. Because knowledge is free, everyone can claim to have it. So the value of a credential has gone up. An actual MIT degree vs classes taken at MIT OpenCourseware is orders of magnitude more significant. You can learn anything for free now…

> An actual MIT degree vs classes taken at MIT OpenCourseware is orders of magnitude more significant.

Most people are not autodidacts, so this would be a common perception even without the credentialism.

Re: Accenture to Acquire Udacity

#17

Post by satvikpendem »

beoberha wrote: post #6

This is unfortunate to see. I remember when these alt-Ed startups were all the rage and there was a genuine belief that we were on the cusp of a paradigm shift in how we learned. Would love to hear some success stories if anyone has any!

Schools and colleges work because they enforce discipline first and foremost, and learning only secondarily. With online programs, if there is no discipline inherent in the student, which is the vast majority of people, there is no paradigm shift. Certainly, the best students will naturally learn, from any source, but that has been true historically.

Re: Accenture to Acquire Udacity

#18

Post by frakkingcylons »

I am so grateful to Udacity and the CS 101 course. I had tried to learn programming at least three times using different resources. Each time I struggled with basic concepts and it seemed like I'd just never figure it out.

Then in 2012, I tried the CS 101 course and finally everything just fell into place. Obviously it just taught me the basics, but I came out of that course with the feeling that I could keep at it and make some really interesting stuff. The next two years were a really exciting time for me as I switched majors to CS and then got a paid internship in 2014 (from a post on Who's Hiring!). I've been working full-time since 2017 and I'm so happy that I was able to break into this industry.

Re: Accenture to Acquire Udacity

#19

Post by BWStearns »

beoberha wrote: post #6

This is unfortunate to see. I remember when these alt-Ed startups were all the rage and there was a genuine belief that we were on the cusp of a paradigm shift in how we learned. Would love to hear some success stories if anyone has any!

Peter Norvig’s udacity class was probably the thing that made me employable when I was just getting started. Udacity in general was an amazing resource around 2012-14(+?) because it was very high quality and free. They had courses that would get you through an interview but also a decent amount that went deeper. I will always have good memories of them.

Re: Accenture to Acquire Udacity

#20

Post by ghaff »

TuringNYC wrote: post #7
yen223 wrote: post #2

This definitely wasn't in my 2024 bingo card. What does Accenture (or for that matter Udacity) have to gain from this acquisition?

Accenture has >730,000 employees ( https://newsroom.accenture.com/fact-sheet ) Much of their model is hiring entry-level to junior resources, upskill them, bill them out to clients at high mark-ups. Many parts of the workforce follow an up-or-out mentality and technical/functional upskilling is a key component to this, rather than just tenure. Purchasing a platform to train that many people is probably a bargain comp…

The whole ex-MOOC and other online learning landscape has basically turned into (and mostly always was) continuing professional education. It's nice that there are still some options out there like OCW but it's mostly been a pretty dismal failure from the perspective of really transforming anything.
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