udacity online education presented by sebastian thrun

udacity online education presented by sebastian thrun
sebastian thrun, the CEO and co-founder of udacity, wearing google glasses
image © designboom

in our most recent trip to istanbul, designboom met up with sebastian thrun at the turkey innovation week conference.

udacity was born out of a stanford university experiment in which sebastian thrun and peter norvig offered their ‘introduction to artificial intelligence’ course online to anyone, for free. over 160,000 students in more than 190 countries enrolled and not much later, udacity was born. by making high-quality classes affordable and accessible for students across the globe: udacity is democratizing education. in the conference he talked about higher education as a basic human right, and how udacity seeks to empower students to advance their education and careers. the name udacity comes from the company’s desire to be ‘audacious for you, the student’. the first two courses launched on udacity started in february 2012 – CS 101: building a search engine – and – CS 373: programming a robotic car.

sebastian thrun is a research professor of computer science at stanford university, a google fellow, a member of the national academy of engineering and the german academy of sciences. thrun is best known for his research in robotics and machine learning, specifically his work with self-driving cars and project lead on google glass.

the courses

education is no longer a one-time event but a lifelong experience. ‘this has raised the question, is college worth it?’ says thrun. ‘I understand that european colleges are financed differently, they too are subject to being hindered by taxer payers contributions’. udacity is trying to reinvent education for the 21st century by bridging the gap between real-world skills, relevant education, and employment. students will be fluent in new technology, modern mathematics, science, and critical thinking.

images from thrun’s presentation in istanbul

udacity has forged a partnership with cloudera to bring comprehensive data science curriculum to a massively open online course (MOOC) format in a program called cloudera university — allowing anyone to learn the intricacies of hadoop and other data science methods.

this coming january (2014), several hundred computer science students around the world will begin taking classes for an online master’s degree program being jointly offered by udacity and the georgia institute of technology. fees will be substantial – $6,600 for the equivalent of a three-semester course of study – but still less than one-third of what an in-state student would pay at georgia tech, and one-seventh of the tuition charged to an out-of-state one. georgia tech professors will teach the courses and handle admissions and accreditation, and students will get a georgia tech diploma, but udacity will host the course material. expenses are being covered by AT&T.

higher education is broken with increasingly higher costs for both students and our society at large.

‘in USA we spend approximately $400 billion annually on universities‘, thrun states. ‘two years ago, we decided to offer courses online, free of charge.’

‘at the end of the day, the true value proposition of education is employment‘, thrun says. he just posted udacity news on the online university learn.think.do blog, where he announced udacity’s move away from the academic massive open online course model towards more vocational, industry-specific programmes.

coming soon: exploratory data analysis – start january 2014