Ironically, if he has left to concentrate on Udacity, my own belief is that he is a poor teacher. Of course it depends on which pedagogical teat you are sucking from, but my experience of Thrun's delivered Udacity courses is poor. Many of his video segments seem to involve him slavishly following his 'script', occasionally hissing out encouraging phrases such as 'Isn't this great!'. He hasn't sequenced a series of lo…
Isaac Newton famously had to give three lectures to students at Oxford in order to maintain his status as a professor. His first was so dense and impenetrable that the final two were given to utterly empty rooms. Apparently that did not alter his teaching style at all.
One does not have to be a good teacher to have something worth learning from.
That said I did one of his first courses and found it simple to follow and better in the bite sized format than traditional lectures.