
Sebastian Thrun Steps Down as Udacity's CEO - datawrangler
http://fortune.com/2016/04/22/sebastian-thrun-udacity/
======
Fede_V
The original business model of coursera/udacity was to offer the option to
take most courses for free, but require people to pay for credentials.

This is not obviously a bad idea: the quality of teaching at Harvard or
Stanford is probably better than that you obtain in most universities, but the
one of the main added values are the network of people you meet, and the
credential of having attended a very prestigious university.

However: the kind of person that takes a lot of online courses is probably
already an educated professional, and for her, the main added value is the joy
of learning new things, and the credentials themselves are near worthless.

I'm sure they have lots of very smart people who thought hard about how to
best monetize their offerings, but, for me, I would definitely pay a flat fee
per month just to be able to keep sampling every course I want.

~~~
pj_mukh
Maybe they could've focussed on making the credentials valuable (maybe they
did and it didn't work). AFAIK, if you told an employer you have a
"nanodegree" in something or other, its glossed over.

Usually, you have to back it up with real-world projects. In which case why
would I pay for the degree, I should just go out and build something with the
stuff I learn for free.

~~~
strictnein
Some NSA job listings have mentioned Coursera's (and others) Data Science
specializations.

> "Completion of a data science certificate program (online or other) may
> replace 1 year of relevant experience. Some examples of data science
> certificate programs include those offered by Cloudera, Coursera, Indiana
> University-Bloomington, and University of California-Irvine."

Data Scientist - Entry Level:
[https://www.nsa.gov/psp/applyonline/EMPLOYEE/HRMS/c/HRS_HRAM...](https://www.nsa.gov/psp/applyonline/EMPLOYEE/HRMS/c/HRS_HRAM.HRS_CE.GBL?Page=HRS_CE_JOB_DTL&Action=A&JobOpeningId=1064069&SiteId=1&PostingSeq=1)

Data Scientist:
[https://www.nsa.gov/psp/applyonline/EMPLOYEE/HRMS/c/HRS_HRAM...](https://www.nsa.gov/psp/applyonline/EMPLOYEE/HRMS/c/HRS_HRAM.HRS_CE.GBL?Page=HRS_CE_JOB_DTL&Action=A&JobOpeningId=1067413&SiteId=1&PostingSeq=1)

Might just be an indication of how desperate they are for those positions, but
it could also indicate they're doing a pretty good job educating people.

~~~
intrasight
I looked at their Data Science degree (am still looking). It appears to be a
quality offering.

~~~
Programmatic
I began the JHU Data Scientist Specialization on Coursera and worked through
the Data Scientists Toolbox and R Programming classes, but found them a bit
lackluster in their presentation.

The course content (videos, slides) presents some basics with a large emphasis
on having a "hacker ethos" to do more work and digging on your own to be
successful. The quizzes and projects in the R course demanded the use of
techniques that were outside of the content provided in the lecture. I am not
against having a hacker ethos and personally am happy to research and learn on
my own, but I fail to see the logic in charging money to tell people to
Google. I expect a curriculum to be a self-contained unit of learning, or else
I wouldn't bother with curriculum.

Contrast this to Coursera's excellent (and free) Rice University Interactive
Python Programming classes that are really superb. The Rice University team
put together an online Python interpreter complete with graphics capability so
that students could test each other's code. The R class left peer review of
students' code as "do not run the code, eyeball it and see if it looks right".
I understand why they did it (execution of potentially harmful code), but
Rice's solution was elegant.

~~~
mindcrime
_I am not against having a hacker ethos and personally am happy to research
and learn on my own, but I fail to see the logic in charging money to tell
people to Google._

I'm about halfway through the JHU Data Science program and I agree that
there's a fair amount of "extra" work you have to do. But still, coming into
it as somebody who had never used R at all before, I've learned a ton and have
definitely found it to be worth the money I've spent (I plan to actually do
the entire track and get the certificate and everything).

Now that said, I probably woulnd't pay much more than what they're charging
now (I think most of these classes have been $49.00 / class so far), but at
that rate, I definitely feel that it's been worthwhile. And even if it isn't a
formal degree, it still gives me the ability to legitimately mention JHU on my
resume. So if somebody is just quick skimming my resume to make a decision on
which pile to sort it into, that probably gives mine a small nudge in favor of
the "look deeper" pile.

------
Artoemius
I wonder what is hidden behind the phrase "the college partnerships failed".

I took some great courses on Udacity, Coursera, and edX back in the days when
they regularly offered amazing comprehensive college courses for free.

They do still offer free courses. However, it seems that the atmosphere of
free accessible education is somehow lost, with the advent of the
"specializations" and "nanodegrees" and the like. Or maybe I just got older
and more cynical, I'm not sure.

~~~
canistr
As a current Georgia Tech student doing the Online Master's in CS, I wonder
this too because it's the primary method of delivery for lectures.

For the most part, I'm not crazy about the Udacity platform and the lectures
(they're too short, the mini-quizzes aren't always that great, and the
platform doesn't feel like it has been improving in the past 2 years).
However, all the value and learning is coming from the interactions with other
students/TAs/professors on Piazza as well as the assignments/projects we do.

If you were to ask me how I would rate each component independently, I would
say that Udacity is the weakest part of the experience.

~~~
dikaiosune
How would you rate the rest of the experience?

~~~
nkozyra
Not the addressee but it's spectacular all around. There are a few classes
that have a reputation for being poorly designed/maintained and a few with
somewhat "unreasonable" time requirements (ie 50 hours a week for a single
class). There are classes where you only interact with TAs/students (which is
fine) and some where the professor is seemingly on a 24-hour modafinil drip,
there to answer any question posed at any time.

For the most part it's intensive and immersive with enough learn-at-your-own-
pace aspects to accommodate full-time jobs, families, hobbies, etc. I feel
like I come away from every class like I've actually learned something that's
embedded in me.

Udacity is what it is: a platform for watching videos with some minor ability
to interact with coding examples / quizzes throughout. I have no issue with
it, but agree that most of the meat of the courses come from other parts of
the classes.

My hunch here, through Thrun's quotes and some in this, is that there were
some aspects of CEO at this level that really didn't appeal to him. How many
CEOs truly get to be personally creative in their position?

~~~
CardenB
"There are a few classes that have a reputation for being poorly
designed/maintained and a few with somewhat "unreasonable" time requirements
(ie 50 hours a week for a single class)."

As a current Georgia Tech student, I welcome you.

~~~
nkozyra
Thanks, I'm more than halfway finished :)

I've often wondered what on-campus students think of the program given there
are a lot of competing elements to having both at an esteemed CS school. I've
tried thinking about my undergrad days and how I'd feel if there were an
equivalent program.

~~~
kageneko
I was accepted to the program the year that the online masters was announced.
At first, I was not amused.

However, I really really enjoyed my time actually being on campus. There were
a few classes I took that would have been very difficult to do online, such as
mobile & ubiq computing, where I got to spend quite a bit of time in the
prototyping lab. I also had the chance to socialize a bit with professors and
do some research with them. And personally, I don't do as well with online
classes. I think it's really useful to have both kinds of programs. They're
different experiences and they appeal to different people. Having both campus
and online programs gives more opportunities to innovate in education.

~~~
nkozyra
Thanks for the insight. I would definitely prefer being on campus but don't
think it would gel with a family + full-time job.

------
deepnet
Professor Thrun changed my life, I and many tens of thousands around the world
graduated from his classes, gaining an education that would have been
impossible for many of us.

I am forever in his debt for his tireless work as an educator and his work on
SLAM & Self Driving Cars.

Being taught by practitioners at the cutting edge of research like Thrun,
Norvig, Ng, & Hinton is the education I dreamed of. I hope that Udacity
develops into a full research vehicle and offers its own qualifications, the
UKs Open University is a good model for this.

His 2015 talk on democratising education is visionary, practical and
disruptive.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=898S7o9UnPA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=898S7o9UnPA)

~~~
Gargoyle
It's interesting that the HN community thinks this comment should be
downvoted. There's nothing wrong with it in any way.

------
kumarski
I don't think technology will revolutionize education the way everyone in
Silicon Valley thinks it will.

Accessibility issues, yes.

Disrupting traditional teaching, learning, practicing....hmmm?

~~~
qq66
But "accessibility issues" could completely change the way people learn. What
if each student could access the kind of instruction one gets at Philips
Exeter or Princeton University?

Or what if the tailored aspect of private instruction could be scaled up? For
example, if you give a tough math problem to 1,000,000 students, and want to
have a tutor walk them through the problem, you'd need to have 1,000,000
tutors. But there are probably only 20 types of mistake one can make on a
given math problem. So if you had a "choose your own adventure" solution, one
math teacher could, in a month, record lessons that reach a hundred million
students at a personalized level.

Or, one could make a cost-effective way to learn from the absolute top
practitioners in a field. Most people cannot afford private basketball lessons
with an NBA basketball coach, for example. But let's say such a coach watched
10,000 people play basketball for five minutes each, and recorded five minutes
of feedback for each person (about one year of full-time work). Then, you
could upload a video of you playing, you could algorithmically analyze the
user's playing style, and match them to the person in the set of 10,000 that
matches them best. The five minutes of feedback might be really useful to that
person, and can be delivered at scale.

~~~
thaumasiotes
> if you give a tough math problem to 1,000,000 students, and want to have a
> tutor walk them through the problem, you'd need to have 1,000,000 tutors.
> But there are probably only 20 types of mistake one can make on a given math
> problem. So if you had a "choose your own adventure" solution, one math
> teacher could, in a month, record lessons that reach a hundred million
> students at a personalized level.

Not quite. There may be 20 different types of mistake you could make on the
problem (I would make a lower estimate, personally), but you can make them in
several different places, and the influence of a mistake will be felt in the
rest of the problem.

Udacity deals with this currently by never assigning complicated problems that
might see a mistake in one step show up in a later step; this isn't quite
ideal as instruction, but it makes it possible to automate handling the
assignments.

Some relevant cartoons:

[http://spikedmath.com/240.html](http://spikedmath.com/240.html)

[http://smbc-comics.com/index.php?id=3011](http://smbc-
comics.com/index.php?id=3011)

------
a_small_island
$24mm annual run rate and 30% m/m revenue growth (2015) with a $1B valuation
(2015)

Per the article...

------
erikb
Happy to see that they are doing so well. I was so excited when I joined (one
of) their first class(es), A.I. At the time I was still a university student
and had a hard time going to class, seeing how far technology was ahead of our
teaching methods. Learning online is a much better method for me.

~~~
gedrap
So maybe it's not that learning online is a better method but that you found
better teaching material and online is obviously a easier method to do so?

~~~
erikb
No, I mean it's a much better method. I can start when I want (not Monday
morning, 8 am), I can make a break when I want (if just to google something
that I didn't understand), I can repeat stuff that I didn't understand at
first, and I can continue with homework directly after the lecture (I don't
have to switch rooms and thereby mental context).

------
yeukhon
> Thrun, who will remain as president and chairman of Udacity, said that he
> will continue to work full-time at Udacity, but he will take on a role
> focused on what he is passionate about—innovation.

Just personal interpretation whenever someone says he or she is focusing on
innovation without too much information: "I am not sure what I want to do, I
am going to pretend I know what I want to do with the company's money here."

What is innovation these days?

~~~
argonaut
A bit too cynical, I think. This kind of arrangement, where one of the
cofounders steps down to let someone else run the company, is very very
common. Especially when the person stepping down is more technical/scientific.
Remember that Thrun used to be a professor and used to do/lead research at
Google.

~~~
Bombthecat
Yeah running a business is a complete different story.

