World's First Massive Online Degree Program Starts Today

I'm all for what Udacity, Coursera, and others are trying to do, but there have been proper online universities such as the Open University doing this for years with hundreds of types of degrees, and with bigger classes.

Let's put the "massive" back in "MooC".

Also, $7k? I can get a on-campus CS masters in a world top 100 university here in Ireland for that price. I guess education in the US must be ultra expensive.

Traditional education is far too detached from what is required in industry, and has trouble keeping up with the pace of innovation.

2,360 people applied, each paying a $50 admission fee [0]. That's a cool 118k for admissions triaging. Also on that page, we can see they originally said up to 600 people would be admitted for the pilot program. They admitted 375, with some deferring admission. Maybe the entire 225 other people deferred, but if not I wonder why they scaled back the pilot program.

The average age is 35 for the pilot program vs. 24 for on-campus masters. Interesting, but not very surprising. I'm not far past the on-campus age, but I'm keeping my eyes on such programs for the future.

The specialities they plan to offer is also in [0]. When I first read that page, I was saddened not to see any options related to programming languages. My only other major speciality interest was operating systems, but I burnt out on that a little. The software development process material sounds interesting. I bet there will be a lot of interest in the AI/Robots and machine learning specialities through this program.

I wonder when the courses will be made available for free? An early post about the program promised that "the bare content will be available free of charge." [1] I was hoping to get an idea of what the courses would be like early this year. I don't see anything on Udacity about the courses at the moment.

All that said, I'm excited about this program by Udacity and Georgia Tech, even given the apparent failure of MOOCs we have been hearing about. I say apparent, as I think measuring percent-to-complete is misguided, as I know I have gained plenty of knowledge from courses being offered without completing them. The movement to corporate sponsored project courses is interesting, but I'm not a big fan of the idea to pay to "commit to your success" [2]. The extra guidance will be a boon for some people, though.

[0] https://www.udacity.com/GeorgiaTech

[1] http://blog.udacity.com/2013/05/sebastian-thrun-announcing-o...

[2] https://www.udacity.com/success