

Is Sebastian Thrun's Udacity the future of higher education? - subbu
http://edition.cnn.com/2012/07/05/opinion/bennett-udacity-education/index.html

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avsbst
No.

The class Sebastian Thrun taught on AI, was a class devoid of all the
qualities that made CS 221 one of the (formerly) greatest classes in not only
the CS department, but all of Stanford. His AI class was dumbed down and
slapped with a Stanford logo to make people think that they were performing at
the same academic level as top notch university students when in fact he had
simply lowered the level of achievement so that anyone could take the class.
AI is hard. Machine learning is hard. Computer science is hard. Not everyone
can do it, and no online course will change that fact.

Why can I say this? These are class reviews of CS 221 from Courserank before
and after Sebastian Thrun made it his flagship for online teaching.

============================================================

BEFORE:

============================================================

Note: When taught by Andrew Ng the class received no ratings less than 4/5
stars

"4/5 Stars

Autumn 2006-2007

Andrew Ng

A+

0 of 0 people found this review helpful

Covers a broad spectrum of topics in AI. If you are interested in AI, but you
aren't sure what area in AI you might want to take classes in or you don't
know much about AI, this is a good class to take. After CS 221, you can go on
to CS 229 (machine learning), CS 223B (computer vision), CS 224N (natural
language processing), etc. This class is a lot of work, and most of it is
valuable although not all of the programming assignments were that well
designed when I took it."

\------------------------------------------------------------

"5/5 Stars

Winter 2008-2009

Andrew Ng

A-

0 of 0 people found this review helpful

Good class. Andrew isn't the most exciting lecturer, but you'll learn a lot of
different AI techniques, and the programming assignments are interesting. The
problem sets and midterm are heavily algebra/proof-based, so be prepared. Work
through the section problems and you should be fine with that.

Since all psets, assignments, and the final project can all be done with a
team, make sure you have at least 2 other people you know you can work with,
or else you'll get dragged down."

\------------------------------------------------------------

"5/5 Stars

Winter 2008-2009

Andrew Ng

CR

0 of 0 people found this review helpful

I really enjoyed this class. Very interesting topics, long and involved
problem sets, and not-so-difficult programming assignments. Except, of course,
for the final project. GET A GROUP ... I had to drop down to CR/NC because my
partners dropped the class, and so I spent most of dead and finals weeks
working on this stupid robot dog.

That being said, I loved the class."

\------------------------------------------------------------

"5/5 Stars

Autumn 2009-2010

Andrew Ng

A-

0 of 0 people found this review helpful

Terrific class with great lecture material and interesting videos. I think the
Audi parallel parking itself by driving backwards at 40mph, braking, and
sliding into the parking spot was what kept me going.

The problem sets make sure you really understand the material, and the
programming assignments are a great way to learn Matlab. The project is HARD
and time comsuming, so make sure you have time in your schedule near the end
of the quarter!"

============================================================

AFTER:

============================================================

Note: Under Sebastian Thrun the class has received no rating higher than 3/5
stars, even more telling, look at the comments for Autumn 2011/12 when the
online system that Udacity is based off of was rolled out for Stanford
students.

"3/5 Stars

Winter 2010-2011

Sebastian B Thrun

A-

5 of 5 people found this review helpful

With Thrun class had a very different feel than it would have Ng. It skimped
on the math/theory and focused on intuition and practice. I liked it less, but
for people who are less interested in the math, it was an improvement."

\------------------------------------------------------------

"3/5 Stars

Winter 2010-2011

Sebastian B Thrun

A-

5 of 5 people found this review helpful

If you can take this class with Andrew Ng I would recommend it. The version I
took was pretty poorly taught. The lectures lacked both detail and clear
explanations of the concepts. I feel like I came out of this class without
having learned much of anything."

\------------------------------------------------------------

"1/5 Stars

Autumn 2011-2012

Sebastian B Thrun

B

7 of 7 people found this review helpful

Hands down the worst class I have taken at Stanford. Terribly taught,
unresponsive and incompetent TAs, mixed up deadlines. Avoid at all costs."

\------------------------------------------------------------

"User had not rated this course at the time of reviewing

5 of 5 people found this review helpful

god awful. learned absolutely nothing."

\------------------------------------------------------------

"User had not rated this course at the time of reviewing

7 of 7 people found this review helpful

As the quarter wore on it became painfully clear that the focus on students
was minimal for this class. Lectures aligned poorly with homework material,
coding assignments were rarely well designed, and grading procedures were at
best illogical and at worst completely incomprehensible."

\------------------------------------------------------------

"2/5 Stars

Autumn 2011-2012

Sebastian B Thrun

A-

4 of 4 people found this review helpful

This class was a waste of time. Seriously. The only beneficial part to me was
the final project. Everything else was so frustratingly simplified and easy
that I wanted to slap myself for taking this class.

Here's an actual problem from the midterm that demonstrates our professor's
opinion of Stanford students:

For a coin X, we know P(heads) = 0.3 What is P(tails)?

And whenever there was anything REMOTELY difficult, the teachers would,
without fail, give a hint...

Just skip to 229. It may be tougher, but this class is not worth it anymore."

\------------------------------------------------------------

"User had not rated this course at the time of reviewing

6 of 6 people found this review helpful

Hands down the worst class I have ever taken in my life. This was a joke of a
class, far too easy so the curve was mind boggling (the average on the midterm
was around 97% because they gave the same test to us as they did to the online
class).

Essentially, this class catered to its free online constituency that doesn't
pay for tuition. Seriously, I am completely ashamed of this class, and it has
no place in one of the best AI universities int he world. Only take it if u
need it, otherwise go straight to 229 or something else much better."

\------------------------------------------------------------

"User had not rated this course at the time of reviewing

4 of 4 people found this review helpful

This course is useless and you should probably take it only if you have to.

The class should be the Stanford class given to anyone for free, but it has
became the class for anyone given at Stanford (where we have to pay for it).

The homeworks were really easy, the only difficulty was to understand what was
expected with poor indications. The real lectures sometimes conflicted with
the online videos, and in this case the teachers considered the online video
as the reference. This means that going to the class every morning instead of
looking at free online video gives you a disadvange in this class. (confirmed
by the TAs and posted on the class forums).

In one sentence : if possible take the online free class instead of paying for
it. It will even be better."

RELATED:

Jeff Atwood’s blog post “Please Don’t Learn to Code”
([http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/05/please-dont-
learn-t...](http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/05/please-dont-learn-to-
code.html)).

Kurt Vonnegut’s “Harrison Bergeron” from Welcome to the Monkey House

Edit: Fixed whitespace

TL;DR: Learn AI Hard. Thrun make class dumb. Now anybody learn AI.

~~~
capsule_toy
I'm very surprised that it sounds like he used his Udacity course as the
material for the actual Stanford course. That's a huge disservice to Stanford
students.

Online education is going to take time to develop. If the courses are too
difficult, very few people would make it through them. At this stage, they
need the idea to catch on more than anything else. Once it catches on and they
can establish legitimacy (i.e. being able to hand out degrees or find people
jobs), then it'll be easier to convince prospective students to deal with more
challenging material. It's a balancing act.

~~~
UK-AlasGou
"If the courses are too difficult, very few people would make it through them"
- There's an easy way to solve this. Just have primer courses, or introduction
courses which then lead on to hard courses.

I think online is capable of delivering hard courses, not to is giving it a
disservice.

~~~
waterlesscloud
I've done several of these online courses so far.

The Udacity ones are definitely the easiest of the bunch. I think they aim to
be. That's ok, it seems to be their market, at least at the moment.

Cousera courses seem to be more challenging, though I suspect they still fall
somewhat short of the demands of the actual Stanford classes. But I get more
out of them and prefer them to the Udacity classes.

The best class, by far, was the MITx Circuits class. I found it very demanding
and felt a genuine sense of accomplishment when I completed it. Again, I'm
sure it wasn't as tough as the actual MIT class since the exams were longer
and open book, but it was by no stretch of the imagination easy.

If all the classes at the various options were like the ones that have
completed thus far, I'd pick the EDx (formerly MITx) courses hands down.

------
porter
So much negativity here. Udacity is great. I have a finance background and
struggled through some MIT OCW courses when I was learning how to program, and
then ended up taking a year's worth of computer science courses at UF. One
year later I have my first b2b web application with several dozen paying
customers. I'm now taking some udacity courses and boy, I sure wish these
existed 2 years ago. Udacity won't turn you into a world class computer
scientist, but it is a wonderful way to learn and improve.

~~~
avsbst
"Udacity won't turn you into a world class computer scientist, but it is a
wonderful way to learn and improve."

Exactly, Udacity is essentially a more interactive version of w3schools and
other tutorial websites. With a more expansive collection of areas of study.

The problem stems from this statement, the crux of this post: "Is Sebastian
Thrun's Udacity the future of higher education?"

That's where the negativity comes in. As you said, Udacity won't make you a
world class computer scientists, but that's what universities like Stanford,
MIT, UW, Michigan, Caltech, CMU and other top CS schools are /supposed/ to do.

If you want to learn what AI is generally about, Udacity can help. But if you
want to build a career out it, and become and actual expert, these sites fall
flat on their faces. By embracing Udacity and Coursera as tools of higher
education, Stanford and universities that follow suit are damaging the quality
of the education they provide.

~~~
kkowalczyk
What a complete lack of imagination. You sound like someone who saw the first
flight and said "pfft... 100 meters? I can do better on a bicycle".

Think about possibilities.

Imagine what can happen 10 years from now, when Udacity covers the whole
curriculum of all major majors, not the few courses that they managed to build
in few months of their existence so far.

Imagine what happens if they have 10 years to tweak and improve their
lectures, based on feedback on data they gather from past students. They can
only get better! (which is not the case in physical universities, due to
rotation of lecturers and the fact that some of them were never good to begin
with).

Imagine that they hire faculty to start doing real research project, the way
MIT, Standford et al do, all coordinated via internet, live video calls etc.
Imagine they do it so well that they are allowed to start giving Ph.D.s.

Imagine that they start giving master degrees via testing centers, after you
pay a modest fee for taking the test (something they have already started
doing).

Imagine that they start coordinating in-person study groups via meetup or some
other such service, the way e.g. programmers self-organize and create "Android
SF user group" and such.

Those are just 5 minutes ideas that I'm sure are not escaping Thrun - he's
much smarter than I am.

The disruption here is zero cost. If they can maintain that and expand to
offer more, better courses, it'll be massive.

~~~
avsbst
Your analogy for the current argument is weak at best. A better one would be
that:

I saw the first flight and then Wilbur and Orville went to my local railroad
magnate and somehow convinced him to destroy half his trains and use their
primitive plane for mass transport instead when I had already paid the train
magnate most of my savings for a four year contract to haul my goods to a
distant city. I'm already upset but I give the two people the benefit of the
doubt and send my goods on their plane anyway because there's no alternative.
It promptly crashes and burns and I lose all my money.

Are you arguing that Udacity in its current state will make you a world class
computer scientist? Because that's what /I/ am arguing against. It is not
currently anywhere near a replacement for the current higher education at
Stanford. Look at the reviews above for evidence of this.

Edit: Sarcastic response to above commenter's statement about my imagination
removed. Downvotes duly noted.

------
sopooneo
What portion of any of the hot online education projects could have been done
_without_ the web? For instance, how much of each of them could have been
replicated by mailing people DVD/VHS lecture videos and quiz software? If most
of it could be done without the web, why wasn't it? Cost? Excessive waiting
and friction caused by going through the mail?

I agree with almost everything I've read of what Khan has said, and Thrun is
certainly impressive. But when _other_ people go nuts about the possibilities
of online education, they seem to imply that the primary hindrance to
educational success worldwide has been a lack of access to video lectures. For
most students, I do not think that is the case.

~~~
kkowalczyk
The biggest disruption is zero cost, better lecture format and systematic
approach.

1\. Zero cost.

Yes, there are plenty of web-accessible, paid educational material. Many
people make good business from it (e.g. lynda.com). Zero cost is a
differentiator.

Also, the paid material is usually vocational (e.g. teaching you how to use
photoshop), not physics 101, the kind of material you study in college. I
assume that's because college already exists, gives out diplomas so for-profit
enterprises don't try to compete with colleges.

2\. Better lecture format.

There are free, high-quality lectures (MIT's OCW etc.) but while the content
might be high-quality, the experience is awful. At first I was excited about
OCW but just couldn't bear to sit through 1 hr lecture with paltry written
notes.

Udacity uses the format pioneered by Khan Academy of short videos, has
supplemental like exercises and has a clear path from start to finish.

3\. Systematic approach.

Again, compared to previous initiatives like MIT's OCW, Udacity's goal is to
provide complete courses. Clearly they are at the beginning of delivering that
but I think that we can all agree that their Minimal Viable Product has been
very successful, which validates product-market fit, and it's also clear from
interviews that Udacity has much bigger goals and they are executing pretty
aggressively on them. Remember, Facebook didn't have 600 million users on the
first day.

~~~
bhrgunatha
I think you've missed another very important part out.

There's a very large, and extremely active community based around each course.
Some are necessarily more active than others. Most of them have the actual
teachers participating and I've witnessed the forum evolves into a peer-driven
help system. Peter Norvig's activity on his course's forum was astounding and
I've never seen a more helpful and active online community before.

I haven't seen that with other online courses.

OCW had nothing in terms of community engagement. Coursera does have a forum
for each course, but they are very dry and the engagement factor feels
missing.

I haven't had a chance to take an offering from MITx yet.

I have seen a few interviews where Udacity staff or teachers have said they
deliberately wanted to engage the students and to encourage them to become
active and support each other and I've seen that it's quite a big boost to the
rest of the offering.

------
brown9-2
At the very least Udacity seems to be winning the PR war. Coursera had the
same origin as Thrun's AI class, and arguably had the better platform/user-
experience from day one and today offers many more courses than Udacity - yet
all the attention seems to be on Udacity only.

------
tom_b
I think online, low-cost education will supplant courses taught with low or no
instructor-to-student interaction in a very short window of time.

Less obviously, I think that mentors (teachers and professors at all levels)
who provide value to individual learners will stay in high demand, along with
the institutions that employ them. I also think that the personal networks of
these mentors will become the gateway to top-level employment in many fields.

------
geogra4
As someone who is vaguely familiar with programming and got about 1/2 way
through the Udacity Python course I was disappointed with the education I
received. Udacity courses seem to gamify to the extreme, giving hyper-specific
tasks and immediate feedback without that much context or exploration.

I decided to sign up for an O'Reilly School of Technology course instead. Yes
it's not free, but I fee like I am actually learning something.

------
karpathy
I don't believe that the intent is to replace higher education for the tiny
fraction of us who are lucky enough to be able to afford it thanks to money,
time or location, but to make it much more widely available. Sebastian's quote
from the end of the article: "It's the beginning of higher education for
everybody."

------
carlsednaoui
As a current Udacity Student I believe that we are reaching (or have reached)
the tipping point for online education.

The Udacity classes are very informative and relatively engaging (love the
lecture quizzes), however, I do believe that there is still a lot of room for
improvements.

On another note, I am pretty excited about the upcoming local Udacity Meetups
(<http://udacity.meetup.com/>).

------
leal
(note: did not read the CNN article) I think that all the complaining about
the lack of difficulty is completely missing Thrun's and Norvig's objectives.
The most important thing educators provide is inspiration, not information or
putting students through mental push ups ad nauseam. I think Thrun's classes
are extremely effective in that regard.

------
Shenglong
Often we forget, that "higher education" is just as much about building
networks and adaptation, as learning traditional material. You learn what's
acceptable, what kinds of people are successful, and what kinds of people you
work best with.

You meet the people who are going to find you that dream job. If you're an
entrepreneur, you find the people who you'll want working for/with you. You
meet the people who'll help you get things done.

The question here really shouldn't be about whether Udacity is a good
educational model. It should be about how far it can go - and I absolutely do
not believe it is a replacement for traditional "higher education".

~~~
randomdata
I read somewhere that Udacity's long-term business model is to profit through
building those networks. Of course business models can change, but as it
stands they have a lot of incentive to provide those foundations, more so than
the education itself.

------
neilparikh
A little off topic, but when is the testing center partnership being started?
I read the blog post announcing it, but there was no exact date on when one go
and take the test.

------
nickc1188
Udemy is closer than Udacity to being the future of education but both are far
too narrow.

------
Corvus
A perfect example of Betteridge's Law of Headlines
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_Law_of_Headlines>):

“Any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word 'no'”

------
trevor99
No, it's a good attempt though. Most of his courses are too theoretical to
matter or get anyone anywhere a job.

~~~
UK-AlasGou
The exact opposite criticism from me.

Courses should not be "watered down". They should be as hard as they are at
top universities, other wise they will lose credibility.

Do primer courses, leading on to the harder courses if you have to.

This revolution should be used to make high-end knowledge available to
everyone who seeks it, not to water-down that knowledge. I want online
courses, but good ones which are comparable to top courses.

~~~
trevor99
Sorry, I meant they are too niche.

