
Udacity launching paid course enrollment - bcjordan
https://www.udacity.com/success
======
thatthatis
There are a few things about Udacity that make it different from yet another
TeamTreehouse/Tuts+/Pluralsight/Lynda where you pay to get course content:

1) It appears they're sticking with free if you do-it-yourself and charging
for coaching and certification.

2) Their pedagogical approach, at least in the few courses that I took about a
year ago, has a tightly integrated learn-do loop. And, going beyond just
pausing for a mini-quiz, in the programming lessons you stopped to write
actual code and attempted to "make this pass the unit tests."

2b) Being presented with a conceptual framework, given a problem that
framework could solve, coding your own, then seeing how Peter Norvig would
have coded it was one of the best programming learning experiences I've ever
had.

3) Their content has, historically, never dipped below first-rate.

The transition to more career oriented skills makes me wonder if #3 might go
away, but even if you relax #3, #1 and #2 are better than anything else I'm
aware of.

I try to consume as much elearning content as possible (ideally 2x the hours I
watch tv), and udacity is in my opinion far and away the best producer.

~~~
psbp
I have the same concern about #3 and even the viability of the
certificate/coaching tier. They need to make a pretty compelling case for the
certificates as a valid path to employment.

Though, I'm happy that they managed to find a strategy to monetization without
blocking access to existing course material.

~~~
thatthatis
Certificates solve a huge issue I've had as an e-learner - getting good
credentials for the learning I do electronically.

Prior to this it didn't matter how much you learned on Udacity, there wasn't a
good way to signal that achievement/knowledge/learning.

I'm fine overall because I have traditional credentials that speak well enough
and open enough doors for me. A udacity certificate would just be icing to add
to my resume.

But, the learning Udacity provides is probably most valuable to people who
don't have traditional credentials. And, Udacity as an institution is most
valuable to the economy/society if we can use it as signals of competence for
people without traditional credentials. So I find a lot of reasons to get
really excited about this move.

I imagine there's probably a budget/frugal hack that would work where you take
the course for free, finish it, then enroll in the credential/coaching for a
single month. I wouldn't be at all surprised if one-month-cost post-hoc
credentialing is an intended feature of their platform.

~~~
psbp
yep, it seems built to encourage learning and then pursuing the credentials to
guarantee that enrollment stats are good.

~~~
thatthatis
What do you mean "guarantee that enrollment stats are good"?

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jsnk
One thing that continues to bother me about Coursera (haven't tried Udacity)
is why courses are offered only for a small window of time with stringent due
date requirement. They tout themselves as this revolutionary force in
education. Then why are they so insistent on continuing traditional university
course model?

I wish Coursera would just keep the courses around for people to watch
lectures, do exercises and HW.

~~~
ghaff
There's more or less flexibility depending upon the course (speaking about
Coursera). Some of the reasons given for having a schedule are: \- Provides a
structure that a lot of people find useful \- Is necessary for any sort of
peer grading \- Keeps discussion on discussion board in some degree of sync
with the class.

If you signup for a class, at least the videos are kept around for some length
of time for viewing. That may not be true with grading infrastructures and
obviously not peer grading.

It's a tradeoff. I came into Coursera thinking that I'd like more flexibility.
But I now see the benefits of a more structured approach so long as deadlines
aren't too rigid. After all, if you want something totally unstructured, there
is lots of video and other material on most topics on the Internet

~~~
ics
> It's a tradeoff. I came into Coursera thinking that I'd like more
> flexibility. But I now see the benefits of a more structured approach so
> long as deadlines aren't too rigid. After all, if you want something totally
> unstructured, there is lots of video and other material on most topics on
> the Internet.

This is key. I still find myself wishing the deadlines were different here and
there (or that they were better distributed... taking 10 courses with
everything due in a six hour window Sunday night is annoying and takes being
at least a week ahead to avoid). Still, I know that I do better because of it.
The peer assessments aren't effective in every course but for some they're
absolutely vital.

What I'm really looking forward to is seeing how some courses settle, probably
after receiving a little more institutional support, into better defined
roles. Instead of just splitting up the sequence in terms of "Part I" and
"Part II" they could offer exclusively peer reviewed components for people who
wish to write papers and a quiz/homework component which then give different
certificates (it would be encouraged to earn both). At the moment EdX seems to
be the strongest supporter of human review (either peers or TAs) with Harvard
courses such as Copyright Law and National Security, but they can do it
because the classes are limited to a few hundred people and everyone else must
audit.

~~~
ghaff
Peer review can be pretty good for a number of things when the students doing
the reviewing are reasonably competent in the material. They get more
problematic as the diversity of the class increases. In my experience, they're
also pretty reasonable at grading according to a well-defined and explained
rubric (though in a large enough population there will be frustrating
outliers). They're much less good at providing useful feedback--a point that
seems to be ignored far to often in discussions about peer review.

I'm actually taking a Harvard edX course at the moment that takes an
interesting approach. For part of the content (labs) what they do instead of
peer grading is a self-assessment with detailed evaluation criteria. This
works quite well in this instance. If you don't concern yourself with
certification it makes a lot of sense to focus on what provides the best
feedback.

~~~
ics
Have you taken the Dan Grossman's Programming Languages on Coursera? It gives
a very detailed rubric– you're required to complete 3 peer reviews _and_ a
self evaluation with the same rubric. That being said the peer review is only
worth 10% of your homework grade, the rest is done by the autograder. I
haven't gotten a ton of feedback so far– just reviewing other people's
solutions is probably more helpful. Still, it's better than some of the other
courses. It would be great if there was an incentive for providing meaningful
feedback– I don't know if _rating_ your feedback would be taking that too far
but it might be more effective than a simple wordcount.

My experience on EdX is limited to MIT and Delft– I'm looking forward to a
time when I can try out one of the Harvard classes.

~~~
ghaff
I haven't taken that particular course. I suspect that peer grading could be
made better through incentives but, at some point, you're limited by what your
peers are capable of in terms of providing feedback. That said, even making
the peer review process more explicitly about feedback than grades would be a
be a nice framing in the right direction.

I'm taking a HarvardX course on Science and Cooking at the moment which is
very well done. Not exactly programming though :-)

------
ghaff
Interesting to ponder this in conjunction with this Fast Company article on
Sebastian Thrun [http://www.fastcompany.com/3021473/udacity-sebastian-
thrun-u...](http://www.fastcompany.com/3021473/udacity-sebastian-thrun-uphill-
climb)

It's hard not to see this move as Udacity essentially getting into low touch
(but not lowest touch), presumably high quality self-paced adult education
that seems to be mostly focused on practical Silicon Valley-type skills and
shifting away from trying to "disrupt" education.

~~~
psbp
I think it's still disruptive if you can access all of the course materials
just as you could before.

~~~
ghaff
I'd argue though that MOOCs haven't really been disruptive. If you look at the
demographics of a typical course, it's primarily people who already have
degrees--and multiple degrees in many cases. So they're adult ed to a large
degree. Nothing wrong with that at all. I certainly appreciate them in that
vein. But it's not a disrupter of education.

~~~
darkxanthos
I agree. So far this and others looks more like its disruptive solely within
our echo chamber.

What will be disruptive though is if Udacity or one of the others can become a
credible source for teaching. All of this means nothing on a larger scale
unless it gives you skills and abilities others trust.

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sjtgraham
This is like the gym for the mind, i.e. A great place to get in shape, but
many people will sign up with great intentions and quickly fall by the
wayside. The cognitive dissonance of admitting failure to save some clams will
prevent them from cancelling. Genius!

~~~
dethstar
As you call it gym for the mind, it'd be interesting to see something like
netflix for schooling.

~~~
psbp
What does that mean?

~~~
dethstar
Something that you pay a monthly fee for and gives you access to ton of
things. In this case, you have to pay per month per course, and the courses
come and go.

~~~
psbp
The content is free, you pay monthly for the coaching and a certificate once
you're done. I don't think the courses come and go. From what I've seen,
they've only added to existing courses, and have yet to remove any of them.

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shreyas-satish
This is a fantastic development, and the one-to-one model is perhaps the
logical next step after establishing a one-to-many platform for online
education. I have a couple of questions regarding the coaching aspect though:

1\. Will the coaching group at Udacity be a walled garden, or is Udacity open
to exploring a more liberal scheme by allowing experts from around the
internet to help and earn some money on the side?

2\. How would they maintain a healthy balance between giving constructive
feedback and spoon-feeding learners? To elaborate, while I think one-to-one
feedback would be great occasionally, I suspect that students might misuse
this freedom. Take IRC forums for instance. It can be quite annoying for
experts to repeat answers that are just waiting to be read in the docs. From
the learner's perspective, it might just be easier to ask someone rather than
thinking through the problem and reading the material thoroughly. As a
learner, this can be dangerous habit to develop in the long run. So, I'm
curious how this works out in real.

But, congratulations and best wishes to Udacity. More and more people, me
included, seem to really take to the byte-sized lectures interleaved with
exercises. While, the exercises can sometimes tend to be easy (I can perhaps
understand why), it's problably not too far away until we have more
personalized learning experiences.

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martindale
It's great that the instructor-student model is becoming increasingly
available, but is this really what innovation in education has come to?

~~~
thatthatis
Have you taken courses from udacity and their competitors?

Even if this move just gives them enough money to keep producing more content,
the world is better for it.

Udacity:Coursera::Community College:Harvard (and yes, I am qualified to make
that comparison, I have taken classes from all four)

~~~
KurtMueller
So what you're saying is:

Udacity:Coursera:Community College:Harvard:?:Profit ?

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antonius
Could just be me, but seems just another pay-to-learn type service. What
differentiates Udacity from other similar educational services?

~~~
thatthatis
1) They're still offering free if you go-it-alone 2) Their pedagogical
approach is a bit different, with a great learn-do loop 3) Historically their
content has been "ivy-worthy"

------
liyanchang
Scaling an education venture is a hard problem. You work really hard to figure
out how to distribute quality content cheaply to lots of people and it turns
out that, at the end of the day, it seems that we still rely on labor/cost
intensive methods to teach. [1]

Clearly, Udacity, edX, Khan, etc are successfully solving many problems
(quality content, automated grading, gamification, etc) and that we're moving
in the right direction.

I've very much looking forward to the day were we start to see education costs
decline because we've gotten so much better at mass producing knowledge/love
for learning/reasoning skills/etc.

[1] As a side note, it's not clear to me if actually reasoning and talking
with another human is really required for learning. It certainly seems that
way at the moment, but is this because the content isn't good enough or are
our brains built in a way that learning requires human interaction?

~~~
queensnake
> it's not clear to me if actually reasoning and talking with another human is
> really required for learning.

Dialog. Being able to ask questions, to get clarity on some angle that the
teacher took for granted, uncovering assumptions / knowledge that the teacher
has that the student doesn't.

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Executor
Quite the opposite, deadlines made me cram and guess the multiple choice since
1/2 weeks per quiz was a ridiculously small amount of time to learn. I was
taking both Coursera Computer Cryptography/Networks. If there was no deadline
I could absorb the material at my own pace. In regards to marks, fuck 'em. I
want to learn, not to get "marks" or a "paper".

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erikpukinskis
Am I crazy or do they not actually mention anywhere what the fee is?

~~~
ericlavigne
It varies by course, so you'll need to look through the catalog. The prices
are monthly, and all courses are "at your own pace", but they give an estimate
for each course of how long the course will take.

[https://www.udacity.com/courses](https://www.udacity.com/courses)

Intro to Hadoop and MapReduce costs $150/month (or $105/month early
enrollment) for a course that is estimated to take a month.

[https://www.udacity.com/course/ud617](https://www.udacity.com/course/ud617)

Exploratory Data Analysis costs $150/month (or $105/month early enrollment)
and is estimated to take two months to complete.

[https://www.udacity.com/course/ud651](https://www.udacity.com/course/ud651)

Data Wrangling with MongoDB is $200/month ($140 early enrollment) for an
estimated two months.

[https://www.udacity.com/course/ud032](https://www.udacity.com/course/ud032)

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fierycatnet
I like Udacity, I did... If they want to monetize some of their content, good,
but I wont be participating.

~~~
psbp
What? This is a pretty great way to monetize without locking down the content
itself.

