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

May be they need to incentivize people differently: charge money to sign up for a course. If you finish it, you get it all back (or a certificate - your pick! If you are in the top 10% of the completers, you get a degree as well as your money). If you get through 75%, you get half back. If you get through 50% you get 25% back.

I'm not entirely sure the faculty cost will be lower longer-term, but it depends on a lot of factors that influence how the market will develop, so I can't say for sure. One reason I think it might turn out higher is that MOOCs may be taught by fewer but more super-star professors than traditional universities. Right now the difference between a top and a mediocre professor in pay is not huge, maybe 2x-3x. But if MOOCs succeed in producing really massive-scale courses, the most popular, charismatic professors could become real media superstars. And if they do, and the market is big and competitive enough to support it, they might be able to garner huge salaries through bidding wars between MOOC providers.

For example, imagine that someone like Richard Feynman, rather than giving his famous lecture series at Caltech for his regular Caltech salary, were doing it in a future era of well-developed MOOCs. He announces he's going to do one final series of physics lectures, but he hasn't decided which MOOC company he's going to do it for. I bet he could negotiate a huge fee for that, much more than even a top-end professor is currently paid. Moving back to the modern day, what if, say, Elon Musk offered to teach a MOOC? You could go for a cheaper, less well-known lecturer, but then you risk looking like the 2nd-rate MOOC company compared to your competitors.

If that's how the market develops, MOOCs might have to pay fees closer to what the public-speaking circuit currently pays prominent lecturers, if they want to attract the top speakers. And those fees are orders of magnitudes higher than what a professor currently makes.

I took and take several classes, so far on coursera and edX - and I love it. Taped lectures with quizzes, weekly assignments, exam and maybe even a peer-rated project are definitely a great way to learn something! My goal always is to finish with a certificate because this gives me an idea on how well I am doing.

As a matter of fact I do not like Udacity very much. It is too playful and too unorganized compared to a lot of courses on coursera and pretty much all courses on edX. Udacity tries too hard to educate everybody by being very friendly at all times - this either leads to courses which start out all bubbly and funny and all of a sudden turn complex too suddenly - or courses that stay on that trivial level.

MOOC is awesome but what Thrun apparently doesn't get is that this concept still requires dedication and disciplin from the student. And you can design your class whatever way you like - either the student has it or s/he doesn't.

Also he is comparing apples and pears with his ratio #succesfull/#registered.

#registered of course is a marketing driven KPI and sould be as high as possible, so every time somebody clicks "Learn free" it is counted. But you have to "register" to just figure out what the course really is about and whether it is worth taking!

Also he is a business man and by switching to the new course format it is much easier for Udacity to monetarize - what a surprise. Opposed to edX and coursera, Udacity is kind of a one-man-show and he is maybe too ambitious and lacks patience (see biking with somebody else).

An article on my experience: http://www.joyofdata.de/blog/social-network-analysis-lada-ad...

Thrun's new objective - to give industry a voice in the education process, is a valid objective. Most of the research shows that what people learn in school only contributes in a minor way to what they do - they learn most of what they need to know on-the-job. Udacity's new direction will allow companies to help potential prospects acquire those skills beforehand, in this general education-augmented way. It's not a bad idea, and it's definitely something that was needed.

However, it is sad to see one of the most vocal people toss aside the original goal of providing education to the under-priveleged to help them escape poverty. Just saying that poor people have a different set of challenges that make online classes a "poor fit" for them is the easy way out.

It's also sad to hear him say that the true value proposition of education is employment. The notion that education and employment are hand-in-hand related is the thing that holds back the education system the most. Education is about allowing people to move forward - advancing culture, science, technology, etc. so that we're not all stuck plowing fields with oxen. While capitalism ties these advancements to employment and profit, the connection is based entirely on how things are done now, and not how things could or should be done (or even how they were done in the past).

The problem is not the initiative, it is the product. Merely replicate the classroom form of education to web will not cut it. It is not people learn things once they are out of campus hence the high drop out rate. The most agitated group of people in term of perpetrated learning is programmers. This professor needs to get his cue from place like GitHub, even YouTube. His class content design is boring ... Desperate needs innovation.