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Accenture to Acquire Udacity

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Re: Accenture to Acquire Udacity

#61

Post by danpalmer »

colmvp wrote: post #4

> As for Udacity, which was founded in 2011, it gave the usual kinds of statements a company makes when it gets acquired by a much larger organization like Accenture. That is, it believes that it can reach more people and help them acquire skills as part of the larger entity. That goes without saying, but there had been rumors earlier this year that the company was in talks with Indian edtech company Upgrad with an a…

“But the depth wasn’t there”

They’ll get on great with Accenture then!

Re: Accenture to Acquire Udacity

#62

Post by frou_dh »

MattGaiser wrote: post #54
Apocryphon wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of all the hyped fads on HN a decade ago, MOOCs have fallen even harder than drone startups. What happened to disrupting the overpriced hollow credentialism of higher education?

MOOCs kind of demonstrated that it isn't so hollow, even if just as a filtering function for capable people. Anyone can get the curriculum taught at MIT or Yale now and yet there has been no massive upskilling in the world, nor are there tons of people who attribute MOOCs for tremendous success. Even the ads for the MOOCs now are competing more with DeVry Or U of Phoenix instead of any serious institute of higher edu…

The expectation vs reality seems reminiscent of earlier utopian ideas about the web itself and how instant access to all knowledge would change humanity.

Re: Accenture to Acquire Udacity

#63

Post by cm277 »

colmvp wrote: post #4

> As for Udacity, which was founded in 2011, it gave the usual kinds of statements a company makes when it gets acquired by a much larger organization like Accenture. That is, it believes that it can reach more people and help them acquire skills as part of the larger entity. That goes without saying, but there had been rumors earlier this year that the company was in talks with Indian edtech company Upgrad with an a…

There's a disruption coming. One of the clearest LLM use cases is in learning and development. Another one is in producing "first drafts" of documents based on past work and "best practices". Both areas are what Accenture (and Deloitte, etc) excel at.

It's also a major disruptor for their business model: if the effort spent on "first drafts" and simple analysis is made automatically by LLMs, then you dont need as many juniors; your employee base gets smaller. But then how do you get experts if you hire fewer (better even) juniors? big consulting Cos are pyramids and these pyramids need feeding, continuously.

I think this is a brilliant move: Accenture has tons of capability in L&D that they've built up for their own purposes --feeding the pyramid. It's a capacity that they can easily offer to enterprises as an additional service, and they will probably use a lot of LLMs to deliver it. OTOH, this also gives them optionality in upskilling people (pushing them up the pyramid) while maybe having a narrower pyramid base because of the LLM disruption.

Expect Deloitte and the others to follow. It's too good a play.

Re: Accenture to Acquire Udacity

#64

Post by farhanhubble »

I joined Udacity when the mission was "Double the world's GDP" and the best engineers and researchers flocked there to create great content. I loved the culture and the people. It was family in the truest sense. When I left the company, it had been hijacked by greedy and stupid MBAs running the show with a huge number of unwanted meetings, buzzword-filled marketing, sub-par content, and burning cash with random "data-driven" experiments.

People passionate about education and those with genuine ideas were sidelined and many were let go in multiple rounds of layoffs. It's so painful to see Udacity being bought by Accenture, another MBA/consultants-led shitshow.

The courses that were created until circa 2018 were amazing. Those created afterward were barely worth the time, let alone the money.

I hope someday the great folks will get back together and build another great learning platform again.

Re: Accenture to Acquire Udacity

#65

Post by __rito__ »

A lot of people are wondering why MOOCs as a whole industry failed. I learned a lot from MOOCs, and can attribute much of my professional success to MOOCs. I can think of these reasons-

1. There are so much great content available for free, it almost doesn't make sense to pay for stuff.

2. Lots of universities, including MIT, NYU release their content for free along with handouts, assignments, problem sets, etc. And many great professors from other unis also release a lot of courses for free.

3. Much of the focus was on certificates, and honestly employers don't value them a lot, and higher education institutes don't value them at all.

4. Quality diminished in MOOCs. The early MOOCs from 2010s are of greater quality than the stuff that are released recently.

5. To make it in life, you are far better off with a university degree rather than without. And, people can't solely rely on online education.

6. MOOCs are expensive. Udacity nanodegrees were $1,000. My entire Master’s degree in CS was ~$1500 (in India).

7. They started focusing more on online degrees which almost no one value. And they are obscenely expensive. And platforms focus more and more on them. Think of Sedgewick's Algorithms course on Coursera. I don't see any new course of similar quality there. Focus is entirely on the online "degrees".

8. Good people left to do something cooler to them. The people who created Coursera, Udacity, etc. now do something else. Most provably some AI startup. People not similar to them are running the show now.

9. Coursera, edX, Udacity all have horrible, slow UIs. After a 2-8 minutes lecture (played in 1.5x) makes you wait a slow full 2 seconds to load the next page. And this is breaking, IMO. I would take a 2.5 hours university class lecture over this any day.

10. Unis use their own platform and abandoned joint ventures (?) because, maybe, lack of control. MIT has MITx, and some truly great new courses. I don't think they upload in edX anymore.

11. As per their behaviour, they focused on company-wide training, upskilling, etc. But I think most corporates don't look to upskill employees in a holistic way. They just want some tool specific training for their employees, that are too the point, practical in a negative way, and solely focuses on the tool at hand. Not every company is Texas Instruments, Facebool AIR, DeepMind, etc.

12. Despite all these, MOOCs are still successful, now often riding on particular people. They have their own websites with their own pricings, and own UI design. Think Jeremy Howard with fast.ai.

I think these are causes for the decline of MOOCA hype wave.

Re: Accenture to Acquire Udacity

#66

Post by graemep »

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…

There have been huge changes, and where you do not need the credentials, or can get credentials separately from the courses, it has changed dramatically.

I have one a number of online courses, watched lectures that are put on Youtube, used material from university courses from their websites, and more. Some work related, some just for fun.

I do not think everyone has caught up with the changes, and the benefits for general education.

It is not just for adult, professional or university level education either. There has is a lot available for school level (to be clear in the British sense - primary school, secondary school/high school) education.

Schools have not (yet, I hope) changed although what some did during lockdown showed what could be done, but home educators have (at least to an extent): online courses, remote tuition, online materials are a huge advance on textbooks plus local classes or tutors. For example my daughter is doing an online course for history GCSE (UK exam taken at 16 in schools, roughly high school diploma level AFAIK), has a remote tutor for classical civilisation GCSE (and help with latin revision though she self taught that). The supervision for the observations for astronomy GCSE was done remotely too.

There is a lot of potential to do things differently, but change takes time. Systems have a lot of inertia in them.

Re: Accenture to Acquire Udacity

#67

Post by dagw »

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?

While I haven't worked for Accenture, I have worked for other consulting companies and designing and delivering custom in house eduction programs to companies was a non-trivial part of what parts of the company did. I imagine that they see Udacity as a platform for growing that part of the business.

Re: Accenture to Acquire Udacity

#68

Post by dagw »

Brajeshwar wrote: post #31

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 does a lot of training and education, both training their in house consultants as well as offering tailored training programs to their clients. I'm guessing that they see this as a platform for improving and streamlining the delivery of these courses.

Re: Accenture to Acquire Udacity

#69

Post by geodel »

frou_dh wrote: post #62
MattGaiser wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MOOCs kind of demonstrated that it isn't so hollow, even if just as a filtering function for capable people. Anyone can get the curriculum taught at MIT or Yale now and yet there has been no massive upskilling in the world, nor are there tons of people who attribute MOOCs for tremendous success. Even the ads for the MOOCs now are competing more with DeVry Or U of Phoenix instead of any serious institute of higher edu…

The expectation vs reality seems reminiscent of earlier utopian ideas about the web itself and how instant access to all knowledge would change humanity.

I think it did change humanity. People are howling and shouting more. Fake news, infomercials are providing all the information to humanity which gatekeepers like college/universities/libraries didn't really provide. Wealth is getting concentrated among people who promote those platforms and work there.

Re: Accenture to Acquire Udacity

#70

Post by geodel »

drewda wrote: post #45

Now that Sebastian Thrun has succeeded at replacing all American universities with Udacity, he can focus fully on self-driving cars... or little electric aircraft for rich people... or whatever it is that is his next innovation that is guaranteed to succeed by the gullible tech press.

I think these cars and planes will run on cutting edge technology like Andreessen-Horowitz AI HotAir for power and Block chains for seatbelts. This will change everything.
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