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Udacity and the future of online universities
61–70 of 73 posts
Re: Udacity and the future of online universities
#62It looks like Khan Academy for college-level, semester long classes. He should target the University of Phoenix's crappy online program. Their parent company, the Apollo Group, has a market cap of $7B. Thrun could easily take a huge bite out of that.
Not with one class and no accreditation, he won't. UOP is the largest private educator in the US with more than 400,000 paid students. Setting aside the fact that a single online class is nothing close to a "University", he's got a long way to go before he can make a dent in the #1 company in the industry.
Re: Udacity and the future of online universities
#63I have built something to keep track of all these courses http://www.class-central.com . Currently tracking just Coursera(Stanford's online learning initiative) courses, but would be adding UDACITY and MITx courses(when they are announced) soon.
Hi! We built http://www.skillpunch.com about two weeks ago and it looks like we're going into a similar direction. :) Emailed you!
Just went through your site - instant bookmark!
Great work collecting it. I would do some user-tests on the landing page though. It needs a tiny bit more content and a clearer 'best path' call-to-action.
Re: Udacity and the future of online universities
#64Relevant to this article is a blog post written by a Stanford Student taking the machine learning class: http://pennyhacks.com/2011/12/28/stanford-free-classes-a-rev... HN discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3399976
Also if I may make a shameless plug for mine:
http://www.rioleo.org/a-reflection-on-stanfords-ai-class-db-...
Ironic, I just posted this 3 days ago.
Re: Udacity and the future of online universities
#65I hope this is just a first step toward big future ideas. Many highly sought professors already have great brands, and I'm surprised that they are so highly underpaid for what they do. Many of them could be getting paid a lot more in scale. Further, they could also be providing value-add services to directly validate some of the best on-line students and grant certifications of expertise. Think of the mozilla badge m…
The average salary of a professor at Stanford is $148,000. I think it's unfortunate that he had to step away from the possibility of influencing those who do make it to Stanford in favor of catering to the world. It's great that he does so, but there's also plenty of reasons why he would be affecting many different minds at Stanford.
[1] http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/05/14/...
Re: Udacity and the future of online universities
#66I think Stanford is more for keeping things closer to the status quo. Students in seats is how they make their money, after all. Not to say that they won't make courses online. I think they would be more than happy to charge $5,000 like they do through SCPD. However, if this develops the way I think it does, the economies of scale have to take over, right, especially after reading about Professor Norvig's discussion…
> the economies of scale have to take over, right
Assuming there's enough competition, yes.
Re: Udacity and the future of online universities
#67Part of the backstory here is that ai-class.com is by Udacity (Sebastian Thrun), while ml-class.org and pgm-class.org are by Coursera (Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller). Formerly colleagues from the same department, now competitors with very similar education startups, all the way down to the naming conventions. Lot of fur flying about who copied who. Coursera has been launching a ton of classes[1]. Probably Sebastian fee…
Thrun's pages at Stanford robots.stanford.edu has been taken offline.
Google caches are available by searching robots.stanford.
Somethings up anyhoo.
I hope this will not affect future classes by Stanford professors, I am so looking forward to professor Koller's Probabalistic Graphical Models.
Re: Udacity and the future of online universities
#68Took the AI class and it was just amazing. I never had a professor more passionate (yet still rational :) about a subject. Even though the course made the math and the background sound simple, it wasn't. There is a probably thin line between breaking-down things into a set of well-partitioned and easy to understand statements and oversimplifying really complex systems. Also, the applications (edge detectors, robotic…
having taken all three classes (AI, DB, ML), I have to point out that in my opinion (and that of other people I spoke with) ai-class was _by far_ the worsely organized, passion of the teachers notwithstanding. But I am sure Know Labs learned a lot from it and they can only improve.
I think some of the frustration may be due to Thrun and Norvig style of asking questions he has not yet fully explained and requiring mental leaps.
This seems uncomfortable at first and getting things wrong is hard to bear in the short term.
On the flipside a better and more long lasting understanding is gained from working things out rather than just learning facts.
If they had waited till it was perfect perhaps it would never have happened, teach early, teach often.
Re: Udacity and the future of online universities
#69Re: Udacity and the future of online universities
#70http://robots.stanford.edu/
This link is down
cache available by robots.stanford