I brushed through the article real quick, but what is the likely reasoning for Accenture to acquire Udacity? Is this content play, or talent?
Accenture to Acquire Udacity
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Re: Accenture to Acquire Udacity
#32This 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…
How would this work?
I presume Accenture still has to invest the course content that is specific for them, and then use Udacity as the distribution platform. Why couldn't they do that before just like all the universities that uploaded their courses to Udacity?
Re: Accenture to Acquire Udacity
#33"You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain…"
Re: Accenture to Acquire Udacity
#34[flagged]
Re: Accenture to Acquire Udacity
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 no…
I seriously "took" a few mostly not too challenging MOOCs early on. But, once the novelty wore off, I take a few things on LinkedIn through my company from time to time and go to a few conferences but I find it's hard without a concrete objective of some sort to really go deep on a topic.
True. I also took few computer related and many non-career oriented courses in social science/ history etc. It was fun and then life got busy.
> but I find it's hard without a concrete objective of some sort to really go deep on a topic.
I think this is key. With gazillion courses out there I don't know what is my end goal while randomly choosing interesting courses.
Further, work has become increasingly crappier where no matter what problem to be solved just plan to shove all stuff in Microservice/Kafka/Gitlab/Kubernetes meat grinder. And I remain unmotivated to take any course on these topics.
Re: Accenture to Acquire Udacity
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
This is part of that list where at one point computer were supposed to totally transform learning in school. We know it didn't happen. Them mobile/smartphone were supposed to transform learning on the go that also didn't happen. But worry not, now personalized AI agents will totally transform learning. There will be individualized lectures for every students. No more lack of attention from teachers be bottleneck in learning.
Re: Accenture to Acquire Udacity
#37This 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…
I wonder if Accenture will also try to sell it as an add on in their contracts. Selling education to companies is much more lucrative than selling it to students.
The closest one of these companies has gotten to profitable is Udemy via their business segment.
Re: Accenture to Acquire Udacity
#38I 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 a…
That's a great story! What do you think it was about the course that made it click for you?
Re: Accenture to Acquire Udacity
#39> if the rumored $80 million price tag was correct, that was a precipitous drop in value for a company that raised almost $300 million, per PitchBook, and sported a $1 billion valuation in 2015
So investors lost money
Re: Accenture to Acquire Udacity
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Pretty much. I feel that most people fall in the category of "it would be nice to have these skills", but they aren't necessarily willing to pay the sacrifice in time and investment for it. Same applies for school really, yeah it would nice if I got an A for algorithmic game theory, and maybe the concepts are kinda interesting from a general level, but the nitty gritty is way too complex and painful for me to put beyond in what's required for a B. A big draw of college admissions is to filter out those not passionate.
Learning without passion is the elephant in the room, and I feel once we can solve that then we can look at a real revolution. Although perhaps for the gulf between the passionate and the unpassionate, we may not be that interested in solving it.