
Udacity Says It Can Teach Tech Skills to Millions, and Fast - olalonde
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/17/technology/udacity-says-it-can-teach-tech-skills-to-millions.html?_r=0
======
pakled_engineer
I prefer the MIT OpenCourseware style, where there's no signing up, no trying
to get money out of you and you can come in and just take what you want out of
a course, much of it graduate level classes where knowledge is dumped for it's
own sake, whereas Udacity/Edx/Coursera all seem geared to introductory courses
and selling credentials. I typically just want the lecture notes, assignments,
and the recommended reading now. I find video lectures too clunky to load up
in the bulky UIs of MOOCs, bandwidth problems, and they eat up too much screen
space for working along writing out the programs. I appreciate the condensed
versions in the notes too since I don't have a lot of time to dedicate an hour
to watch a lecture I could read much faster.

For example this course on Elliptic Curves
[http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/mathematics/18-783-elliptic-
curve...](http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/mathematics/18-783-elliptic-curves-
spring-2015/index.htm) I decided to take after going through djb IETF working
group mailing list posts which are so detailed I wanted to understand the
basic math involved. Every post he writes is so thorough it's typically almost
a class in itself in modern security analysis [http://www.ietf.org/mail-
archive/web/cfrg/current/msg07335.h...](http://www.ietf.org/mail-
archive/web/cfrg/current/msg07335.html)

Also, I originally learned "real development" (my decade of hacking around C
willy nilly modifying programs doesn't really count) from Sussman's
"Adventures in Advanced Symbolic Programming" where you read chapters out of
SICP and then work on assignments, with mini lectures built into them in just
plain text [http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-
comput...](http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-computer-
science/6-945-adventures-in-advanced-symbolic-programming-
spring-2009/assignments/)

~~~
Cyph0n
I agree completely. MOOCs require too much commitment to be frank. I'm
currently finishing my EE degree, so I can't really afford to "follow along"
given my already full course lod every semester. In addition, I'm more
interested in slightly advanced topics covered in a rigorous manner.

MIT OCW is the best solution. The self-paced courses on Coursera and Udacity
are OK, but the UI as you say is too clunky, and the content is a bit shallow.

Right now I'm starting to work through Computer Systems Security on OCW [1].
They provide lectures on Youtube, so no need to fiddle around with a third-
party app on mobile. They also provide all lecture notes, exams, and labs for
learning purposes. The content of the course itself looks extremely
interesting as well, and covers a wide array of topics related mainly to RE.

[1]: [http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-
comput...](http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-computer-
science/6-858-computer-systems-security-fall-2014/)

~~~
pakled_engineer
You can also look up the recent course and usually get updated lecture notes
too, often course calendars are available at MIT and not locked for student
authentication
[http://css.csail.mit.edu/6.858/2015/schedule.html](http://css.csail.mit.edu/6.858/2015/schedule.html)

Speaking of Prof. Zeldovich he's releasing this traffic analysis resistant
messenging scheme with some grad students in October
[http://people.csail.mit.edu/nickolai/papers/vandenhooff-
vuvu...](http://people.csail.mit.edu/nickolai/papers/vandenhooff-vuvuzela.pdf)

------
artgillespie
I'm the Director of Engineering at Udacity and wanted to clarify a couple
things: All of our content is available at no cost. It's an important
manifestation of one of our most important core values—that education is
available to everyone. What we charge for are services. Students enrolled in
Nanodegree Programs have access to coaches, a massive worldwide network of
code reviewers, certification, job placement and much, much more.

We work hard to help Nanodegree Program students that are looking for jobs in
tech get them. For example, one of the best parts of my job is doing mock
interviews. Folks on the engineering team volunteer to give a representative
tech industry interview to a soon-to-be-graduate and then give them detailed
feedback on how they could improve. Hearing back from these students a few
weeks later that they got a job at Nest or Google or wherever is one of the
most satisfying things I've experienced in my career, and everyone on the team
who's done it feels the same.

Finally, we really do think our graduates are ready for jobs. So much so that
we've hired two of them as full-time SWEs onto the small engineering team at
Udacity. This has worked out incredibly well—these are smart, effective
engineers that I'd put up against any traditional school's CS grads. We'll be
hiring more of them, and we hear from companies that have hired our graduates
that they'll be doing the same.

------
netcan
I'm a little disappointed at the comments here. It's fine to point out flaws
and downsides. comparisons to other options like traditional universities,
free options. Udacity might even ultimately suck.

But, this is very early in the game and MOOCs are part of the progress,
whatever their eventual form or role.

The price of education will ultimately come down to a bunch of things that are
still unclear. Can it work at scale without dedicated teachers, dedicated full
time pursuit. Can credentialing be solved or bypassed at scale.

The "people want it" is there and the only way to figure things out is to try
scaling. That could take decades, culture takes time to evolve.

I don't care about Udacity or anything else, but I'd like to see the concept
of better education, cheaper using technology. So, I'm happy to hear them say
something like "can be scaled up to teach millions of people technical
skills." Try it. If they succeed, great.

~~~
mtbcoder
I don't think the criticism is against the concept of MOOCs but rather the
over-exaggerated claims being made regarding proficiency achieved from the
cursory information provided in a given program and career opportunities
available after completing said program.

------
radmuzom
I recently completed 7 Udacity courses in less than 2 months. All of them are
from the 'Front End Developer' nanodegree. I am not enrolled in the program, I
am just taking the courses for free by watching the lecture notes and doing
the short quizzes.

Pros:

1\. It provides good breadth of knowledge around what is possible.

2\. The style is engaging and the videos are short and well made. I have tried
to take Coursera courses before, but always ended up dropping out after the
first couple of lectures.

3\. It gives you a specific goal; most of the nanodegree courses are geared
towards completing a specific project.

4\. I was able to quickly get my personal website up and running (I believe in
using completely static HTML + CSS, JS when required, and the courses helped
me to learn enough to quickly hack together something just using Notepad++).

5\. I have plans to enroll for a Nanodegree later. It is quite affordable even
for people in developing countries (like me), after accounting for exchange
rate fluctuations and cost of living.

Cons:

1\. The courses don't go too deep, and you won't become a master unless you
are motivated enough to do the work yourself (e.g. Introduction to jQuery - it
gives a flavour of what is possible to do with jQuery, but does not go into
any depth if you want to be an expert).

2\. What you get out of the course if entirely up to your motivation in
improving yourself. Completing the courses alone won't be enough to pick up a
new skill.

~~~
mattmanser
Wait until you have more than one page and want to change your menu. Then you
won't believe in completely static HTML + CSS.

I used Jekyll for my blog, but ultimately it's just not worth the effort and
definitely impractical.

~~~
vikp
Off topic, but I use Jekyll for my blog, too.

It's compiled to static HTML, sure, but the templating is pretty powerful
(downsides of Liquid aside). It's easy to make global changes with templates
and CSS.

Octopress can make a lot of Jekyll tasks easier --
[https://github.com/octopress/octopress](https://github.com/octopress/octopress).

------
ismail
"Lower education costs"? Nah i doubt it. Maybe just for the US, but not for
the rest of the world.

At $ 200 per a month it is almost as expensive as a top tier university in
South Africa.

Udacity Cost per a Month: $200

Cost at a South African University: +- $3000 per year/10 months = $300 per a
month.

This excludes any discounts, bursaries etc. Also ignoring the different levels
of quality and depth of what you will be learning.

~~~
LoSboccacc
You don't need to go that far. Even in europe univs are quite affordable. I
attended engineering at Politecnico of Milano and it costed me well south of
3k/year.

It seems it's mostly the US having an issue in education costs.

~~~
peatmoss
I think the distinction here is between "cost to provide education" and
"direct costs to students." You can, through government subsidy, have an
expensive-to-provide education delivered at a low cost to students.

Most public universities around the globe that are cheap to students are cheap
because of these subsidies. Udacity, if you believe is providing a comparable
good, is going the cheap-to-provide route. Admirable if it works, because we
can educate the masses without spending a lot as a society.

As someone who has spent a fair amount of time in academia (masters, first
half of phd), I see areas where Udacity is a good substitute, and areas where
it is not. If you're an undergrad sitting in the back row of a lecture hall,
why not Udacity? If you're a grad student doing research, obviously not. If
you're a grad student doing advanced coursework... maybe?

~~~
ismail
Great point. I think the question is, how do you scale this so for example a
University here in South Africa. That may not have the resources is able to
tap into the flood of content that is being created in the education space,
reducing the cost for students here in South Africa and uplifting millions.

------
codeonfire
What I find ridiculous in this article is how bad and social focused Google
hiring has become. Google regularly declines to hire people with pHds or
decades of real dev experience for developer jobs, yet hires a person after
one "full stack developer course?" Reading between the lines we can see how
this really works: female: +1, ivy school: +1, young: +1, etc.

On the topic of udacity, I knew from the beginning these claims that they were
going to replace traditional education were equally ridiculous. Their courses
might get some people jobs they can't handle, and those organizations will
subsequently fail at their attempts to develop products. I see stupid stuff
all day long. My previous employer hired (IMO) unqualified engineers for (IMO)
social reasons. Those people did not commit anything resembling code for
months, but of course social politics of the workplace prevented them from
being fired or anyone saying anything about their non-work.

Traditional education is traditional. This means everything else has been
tried. Everything. MOOC's are not dissimilar to paper based correspondence
work that has been around somewhere on the planet for probably hundreds of
years. When it gets down to reality, the surviving companies are not going to
say, "you watches some videos for a few months, welcome aboard." Those
companies that do will slowly die off.

------
rahimnathwani
The "full-stack developer" nanodegree mentioned in the article appears on
Udacity's list of nanodegrees but, when you click through, it takes you to a
page entitled "Full Stack Web Developer Nanodegree".

The curriculum seems decent enough[0] but it's focused on a particular skill
set (building and deploying server-rendered web apps and the APIs to support
front-end code). It doesn't cover front-end development (e.g. JavaScript or
specific frameworks like Angular/React), and so it falls short of 'full stack
web', and further short of 'full stack' in the original sense.

[0] [https://www.udacity.com/course/full-stack-web-developer-
nano...](https://www.udacity.com/course/full-stack-web-developer-nanodegree--
nd004)

~~~
gaius
The "full stack" starts with electrical signals a thousand miles away and ends
with glowing pixels in front of you. Javascript is a teeny tiny sliver of the
"stack".

~~~
rahimnathwani
That's what I meant, but I could have worded it more clearly:

\- The lack of JS/front-end means it's not really 'full stack web development'

\- The lack of lower-level stuff means it's definitely not 'full stack
development'

I'm not sure, though, that you and I would draw the 'full stack development'
line in the same place. For me, the lowest level would be OS kernels. For you,
perhaps it would be CPU microcode or even deeper.

If someone could write an OS from scratch (running on an off-the-shelf
hardware) and make that thing respond to HTTP requests, that would be
sufficient to call them a 'full stack developer', right?

~~~
gaius
Well, and render what was returned from that request onto a screen :-) But a
lineprinter would do, I'm old-skool like that.

------
johnminter
Udacity (and Coursera, edX, MIT OpenCourseware) can and do teach very helpful
skills to large groups of self-directed learners. I have benefited from
Coursera. I suspect that most who come here fit into that group. One problem
is that a large proportion of the population do not have the
personality/skills/drive to do this. I would note the Udacity pilot with San
Jose State University. They started with a remedial math course, a college
algebra course and an introductory statistics course. The pass rate of the
stats class was about 50%, the two other courses much lower - 27 and 25% if I
remember correctly.

One approach that has worked better is a partnership with a Community College
(e.g. Bunker Hill in Massachusetts). Here they use a flipped classroom
approach. The students watch online lectures and come to a lab session where
they have an instructor to help when they get stuck and are encouraged work in
groups. This seems to help many get past the hard parts and complete the work.
This approach is obviously more expensive. Very few people work "for free."
Self-motivated, disciplined individuals will always do well with systems that
focus heavily on independent study. Others will have to pay more to access
more personalized support.

------
jakozaur
Reads like a PR written article. Yes online courses are real, but article
almost solely focus on Udacity and its success story.

This is much broader trend (coursera, teamtreehouse etc.). There are also some
obstacles (motivation, huge enrollment though very low percent of course
completion).

I wish journalist do their research, instead of writing semi-ads.

------
coldcode
Anyone can teach fast, the question is does anyone they teach learn and become
productive?

~~~
LoSboccacc
The perils of 'java' schools, written ten years ago and still relevant
[http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/ThePerilsofJavaSchool...](http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/ThePerilsofJavaSchools.html)

Not everyone can be a productive programmer, independently from what they
want, how hard they try or how they are teached

------
gaius
If a man selling guitars and guitar lessons says he has a sure fire way to
make you a rockstar, check your wallet.

~~~
pekk
What did Udacity say that is comparable to "sure fire way to make you a
rockstar"?

------
rtz12
> It Can Teach Tech Skills to Millions, and Fast

I would say that too if I could charge everyone of them $200 every month.

------
redwood
U's cs101 was a game changer for me. Loved blazing through on demand.

U shot itself in the foot with bad PR when it publicized stats that showed
lots of folks starting but not finishing classes. Haters jumped on that. ..
But honestly i never saw the big deal. They're like textbooks... you get
something out of it but seldom read every page. So what... you're learning!

I read this PR piece as U having learned from that horrible move a few years
ago.

------
SQL2219
Motivation not included.

------
ThomPete
This is great news for anyone who want to learn something to create something
but it will hardly help anyone who want to get a job.

~~~
rorykoehler
Kind of ironic isn't it? If you can create something of value from scratch but
still can't get hired what are companies hiring for?

~~~
ThomPete
Problem is that what you can create from scratch isn't what the companies
often need. Instead they need experience in working with something already
created which is quite a different monster IMO.

~~~
rorykoehler
You're right but one can quickly lead to the other if the company is willing
to dedicate even a small amount of resources to training.

~~~
ThomPete
Yes and there in lies the issue. They normally aren't in my experience.

------
graycat
I looked at their _full stack_ program: Apparently for my startup I've done
most or all of that already! So, right, I've got up my Web site, with Web
pages with HTML and CSS, and four _server side_ servers. One of these is just
SQL Server. Another is a Web page session state server I wrote. And the other
two are specialized to the technical internals of my site.

I did it all from self-teaching. Gee whiz.

"Look, Ma: No courses!"

Also looked at their program for training _data analysts_ to "Discover
Insights from Data".

"Insights"? For that goal, there needs to be some caution as in, say,

    
    
         Statistical Science
         2001, Vol. 16, No. 3, 199–231
         Statistical Modeling: The Two Cultures
         Leo Breiman
    

as at

[http://projecteuclid.org/DPubS/Repository/1.0/Disseminate?vi...](http://projecteuclid.org/DPubS/Repository/1.0/Disseminate?view=body&id=pdf_1&handle=euclid.ss/1009213726)

Part of their work is using _exploratory data analysis_. Gee, there's a book
with that title by J. Tukey. I have a copy of the original, that is, the
manuscript, that is, in Tukey's handwriting! It was okay.

They mention finding "anomalies" in data. Okay, how about an _anomaly
detector_ that is both multi-dimensional and distribution-free with false
alarm rate adjustable in small steps over a wide range, say, one a minute,
hour, day, week, month, quarter, and known quite accurately in advance? I
published one of those.

Gee, guys. I also sent 1000+ resumes and got back zip, zilch, and zero.

Are some people hiring? Do they really know what the heck they are looking
for? Will they recognize what they are looking for when they see it? All maybe
not.

