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Udacity's Sebastian Thrun, Godfather Of Free Online Education, Changes Course

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Re: Udacity's Sebastian Thrun, Godfather Of Free Online Education, Changes Course

#41

Post by psbp »

_delirium wrote: post #40
psbp wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

4 courses at coursera: $0 4 courses at my local state university: $5000 - Hell lets be a little bit more equitable: 4 courses at coursera with the signature track: $200 4 courses at my local community college: $400

I think the question was about costs of providing the service, not the tuition charged to students. How much does it cost to produce and operate a MOOC, in terms of total resources put into it? It's a bit difficult to account for, because in this early stage there is quite a bit of unaccounted-for labor. For example, there is some cross-subsidy from existing universities, because much of the Coursera/Udacity curricul…

I couldn't imagine the costs of running an online class being more than a brick and mortar.

Re: Udacity's Sebastian Thrun, Godfather Of Free Online Education, Changes Course

#42

Post by randomdata »

timr wrote: post #36
randomdata wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The world doesn't need another way to spoon-feed infotainment to well-off people with good academic backgrounds Actually, that is exactly what the world needs, and the comments here further emphasize that the demand is there. Before these MOOCs appeared on the scene, the resources were almost non-existent. I don't care about school, I just want to learn. A service like Netflix, but with MOOC-like content would be p…

"Actually, that is exactly what the world needs, and the comments here further emphasize that the demand is there." It emphasizes that lots of people on the internet want something for nothing, which has a surprise quotient of exactly zero.

I could see paying for a quality educational service. I already pay for Netflix and only spend a fraction of the time watching it compared to what I spend on watching MOOC-style videos. Udacity isn't really there though. The videos are top notch, but the user experience is not very good.

Re: Udacity's Sebastian Thrun, Godfather Of Free Online Education, Changes Course

#43

Post by riggins »

psbp wrote: post #35
michaelochurch wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It cracks me up that all of the early comments on this thread are so insistent that course completion shouldn't be a goal. Anyone who has taught a college course can tell you that self-reported satisfaction rates are useless as an educational metric. Everyone "wants" to learn, but almost nobody puts in the effort. MOOCs have provided this hype-driven bubble where the people who "want" education get to pretend that th…

It seems like they have a chicken and egg problem. If the courses aren't valuable aside from the benefits of learning (which can be accomplished through other means), then why bother completing them? Meanwhile, it's hard to take the courses seriously when only 5% of the enrollment finishes the course. They can't expect valid results until the utility of the product is valuable.

it's hard to take the courses seriously when only 5% of the enrollment finishes the course.

Same comment as michaelo.

why does the completion rate matter? If 100,000 people sign up, and 5% complete the course, that's 5k people.

The US is graduating around 12k CS majors per year, so 5k seems like a material number of students to educate.

Re: Udacity's Sebastian Thrun, Godfather Of Free Online Education, Changes Course

#44

Post by MoosePlissken »

timr wrote: post #13

It cracks me up that all of the early comments on this thread are so insistent that course completion shouldn't be a goal. Anyone who has taught a college course can tell you that self-reported satisfaction rates are useless as an educational metric. Everyone "wants" to learn, but almost nobody puts in the effort. MOOCs have provided this hype-driven protective bubble where the people who "want" education get to pret…

How do you measure educational value? If someone finishes 90% of the class but never takes the final exam, have they learned nothing? If someone finishes the class, aces the exam, and then promptly goes on living their life as an IT professional without any tangible change, was the course anything more than "infotainment"?

I'm not sure how you measure "real" learning, but course completion doesn't seem to be a good way of doing it.

Re: Udacity's Sebastian Thrun, Godfather Of Free Online Education, Changes Course

#45

Post by _delirium »

waterlesscloud wrote: post #38
saraid216 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you enumerate the costs involved so that we can see how much less they are?

Call it 7,000 undergrad students at Stanford. 80,000 courses complete at Udacity would be about 11 courses per student, or a very solid academic year of courses. So we could reasonably say the number of Udacity student-courses complete is similar to a year of Stanford's. Call it $40,000 for a Stanford undergrad for a year. A total of $280,000,000 for those 7000 undergrads. Udacity has raised $22 million. So an entire…

Doesn't make an order-of-magnitude change, but two quibbles with the numbers:

1. Stanford sticker-price tuition is ~$44k, but a very small percentage of students pay full price. For example anyone whose family earns less than $100k/year (!) pays no tuition at all. A ballpark guess at average tuition actually paid is ~$20k, though I can't find an official number. Plus Stanford is probably not really the right peer; Udacity is competing to a large extent (in terms of who they might conceivably displace) with cheaper education providers, like community colleges or even the Cal State system.

2. In addition to the $22m, Udacity is currently getting some $millions in donated labor from universities, which are lending out their professors to develop Udacity curricula and teach courses as part of experimental partnership agreements. Long-term it seems that Udacity will need to pay for this labor themselves, if it's to be revenue-neutral rather than cross-subsidized by universities.

Re: Udacity's Sebastian Thrun, Godfather Of Free Online Education, Changes Course

#46

Post by whiskeyfoxtrot »

michaelochurch wrote: post #16
fernly wrote: post #12

Right. The people who create MOOCs are professors who think of what they are making as _courses_ with all the attendant assumptions (grades, exams, success as completion with certain scores). The people who consume the MOOCs treat them as they would _books_ -- to be picked up, sampled, read for the good parts, saved for future reference. The "courses" offered by MOOCs are in fact, _multimedia books_ with an optional…

The old model of education is a cathedral, and DIY is the bazaar, and each approach has its weaknesses. MOOC is about as silly as "horseless carriage". The old model of education similar to a mathematical proof, with technical lemmas built up progressively until there is a macroscopically interesting result. That has a lot of value. Linear algebra is useful in so many fields, and learning it when you have the time, b…

I've had the pleasure of co-organizing a lunchtime Meetup at my work for folks taking Andrew Ng's most recent Machine Learning class on Coursera.

Having taken a few MMOC's over the past couple of years, the addition of a Meetup was, for me at least, a key motivator to keep me involved in the class. Based on others in the group, I think they feel the same.

Re: Udacity's Sebastian Thrun, Godfather Of Free Online Education, Changes Course

#47

Post by AndrewKemendo »

randomdata wrote: post #24
timr wrote: post #13

It cracks me up that all of the early comments on this thread are so insistent that course completion shouldn't be a goal. Anyone who has taught a college course can tell you that self-reported satisfaction rates are useless as an educational metric. Everyone "wants" to learn, but almost nobody puts in the effort. MOOCs have provided this hype-driven protective bubble where the people who "want" education get to pret…

> The world doesn't need another way to spoon-feed infotainment to well-off people with good academic backgrounds Actually, that is exactly what the world needs, and the comments here further emphasize that the demand is there. Before these MOOCs appeared on the scene, the resources were almost non-existent. I don't care about school, I just want to learn. A service like Netflix, but with MOOC-like content would be p…

Actually, that is exactly what the world needs...I don't care about school, I just want to learn.

The disconnect is that you probably don't need to learn as badly as someone impoverished and living in the more closed societies that Thrun is trying to reach.

For them to become competitive in the world market they need to have skills and knowledge that you and most of the people with access to computers and the internet take for granted. So I agree with the parent comment that the world does not need another way for someone with a BS to get marginally smarter on an esoteric topic (for 99% of humanity) like AI. We need a platform for those without access to education to learn how to do basic coding, or learn other skills that will be needed in the coming decades.

Re: Udacity's Sebastian Thrun, Godfather Of Free Online Education, Changes Course

#48

Post by johngalt »

While I like the idea of making courses as independent as possible, some kind of suggested course track might help completion rates.

I passed the original ai-class on schedule with distinction. Then when Udacity started I zipped through intro to CS as a review. When I took Norvig's 'Design of computer programs', it was a kick in the teeth. I knew pretty quick that I wasn't going to finish on schedule, then that I wasn't going to finish at all.

Re: Udacity's Sebastian Thrun, Godfather Of Free Online Education, Changes Course

#49

Post by waterlesscloud »

_delirium wrote: post #45
waterlesscloud wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Call it 7,000 undergrad students at Stanford. 80,000 courses complete at Udacity would be about 11 courses per student, or a very solid academic year of courses. So we could reasonably say the number of Udacity student-courses complete is similar to a year of Stanford's. Call it $40,000 for a Stanford undergrad for a year. A total of $280,000,000 for those 7000 undergrads. Udacity has raised $22 million. So an entire…

Doesn't make an order-of-magnitude change, but two quibbles with the numbers: 1. Stanford sticker-price tuition is ~$44k, but a very small percentage of students pay full price. For example anyone whose family earns less than $100k/year (!) pays no tuition at all. A ballpark guess at average tuition actually paid is ~$20k, though I can't find an official number. Plus Stanford is probably not really the right peer; Ud…

1 - It's not about what the students themselves pay, it's about the cost. And I picked Stanford as sort of middle of the road cost-wise for private education. Public schools are of course subsidized heavily by tax dollars, which reduces tuition but certainly not the actual cost of the education. As far as quality, Udacity instructors and courses are far, far above a typical community college.

2. I picked Udacity since their courses are custom developed for the platform. Coursera courses are often very similar to the courses the instructors developed at their "day job" univeristies, the Udacity courses aren't really. They're new beasts.

Re: Udacity's Sebastian Thrun, Godfather Of Free Online Education, Changes Course

#50

Post by yapcguy »

psbp wrote: post #37
saraid216 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you enumerate the costs involved so that we can see how much less they are?

4 courses at coursera: $0 4 courses at my local state university: $5000 - Hell lets be a little bit more equitable: 4 courses at coursera with the signature track: $200 4 courses at my local community college: $400

1997 Cambridge and Oxford University: FREE

1998 University tuition fees: 1000 GBP/yr

2004 University tuition fees: 3000 GBP/yr

2012 University tuition fees: 9000 GBP/yr

Thanks Tony Blair.

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