Do you have by any chance a link to that particular tweet? I have looked through the tweets since September and just couldn't find it. Would love to read what the feedback was on that suggestion.
Free master's in CS from standford is a pretty mind blowing idea. Would be really curious to see what would happen to higher ed if you completely removed/minimized the cost factor.
Thrun had some interesting things to say about his vision for the future of higher education:
Thrun’s ultimate mission is a virtual university in which the best professors broadcast their lectures to tens of thousands of students. Testing, peer interaction and grading would happen online; a cadre of teaching assistants would provide some human supervision; and the price would be within reach of almost anyone. “Literally, we can probably get the same quality of education I teach in class for about 1 to 2 percent of the cost,” Thrun told me.
The traditional university, in his view, serves a fortunate few, inefficiently, with a business model built on exclusivity. “I’m not at all against the on-campus experience,” he said. “I love it. It’s great. It has a lot of things which cannot be replaced by anything online. But it’s also insanely uneconomical.”
Thrun acknowledges that there are still serious quality-control problems to be licked. How do you keep an invisible student from cheating? How do you even know who is sitting at that remote keyboard? Will the education really be as compelling — and will it last? Thrun believes there are technological answers to all of these questions, some of them being worked out already by other online frontiersmen.
“If we can solve this,” he said, “I think it will disrupt all of higher education.”
It is also interesting that he phrases it never as a Stanford degree but as a degree "of Stanford quality". It is going to be interesting to see how they will leverage the Stanford brand without discounting it.
