This articulates a lot of the misgivings I have about these attempts at reinventing education online. Fundamentally, the problem isn't a lack of technology in education--Udacity took a bad stats class and gave it to the world. Not a great way to prove their worth.
Good classes are hard to make and run. Technological facilitation can make a good class better and it can bring a good class to the world, but the limiting factor here is still quality.
As an aside, Thrun also demonstrated that in many cases those who "do," cannot teach. And he should continue to "do," and find better teachers to do the teaching.
I did not go through the stats course from udacity, but went through the build your own robotic car class. I would like to say the opposite of what the author of this article says. The conventional education system is designed to suit people who lean deductively. They prefer to "stand on top of concepts they know"... Then there are people who like to learn by dabbling. People who learn by tinkering. Such people find too much formalism annoying.
Think of it like this... If your child is trying to stand up and walk, dont try to get its gait perfected. Let it enjoy the success of barely standing and moving a few steps forward. I would say "every child has the right to enjoy this moment"... Not just the Usain bolt's and the ballet dancers. I think irrespective of the subject, the initial learning event is just scaffolding. I don't think the best ballet dancer remembers any part of how she actually learnt to walk.
When I attended the robotics class, I left knowing that "Multiplying gaussians is a cool thing" I figured the skeleton of how particle filters work. Will I drive a car for which I wrote the code. Absolutely not. Will I ask my enemy to sit in a car for which I wrote the code? Absolutely not. But I still got something. Something beyond frustration of being less than "super genius". I left saying "hey that is neat". Tomorrow when I invoke a Kalman filter in say OpenCV, I will feel less insecure about the abilities of that "magic black box". To me the robotic car became a "product of extreme passion created by brilliant hackers" than "mysterious devices created by other worldly geniuses"
If I wanted definitions I would look up Mathworld or something better. If I am going to write a paper on genetics, I am not going to use a stats 101 lecture notes as my reference. But here exists a phase in my learning where I actually do not care about the difference in dividing by N or N-1 or N+1. What the guys obsessed with formalism do is that they make that phase such a huge pain, that I bother not to cross it.
I get a way lot more "per hour invested" or "per dollar invested" from online education. From my point of view. That is the major disruption. The barrier to exploration has been almost eliminated. I could dabble with writing science fiction and then take a peep at anatomy.
Somethings like "A guy walked in and it was left in the video" is a positive sign. It shows that they are a scrappy startup creating a minimum viable product. If people start using this product even without the polish, it indicates real value. This is a standard startup practice. Better production quality means fewer classes and slower growth and less data for analytics. So I actually congratulate them for not obsessing with stuff like Video quality. Do you have any idea how google looked when it was released?
Does it have its shortcomings? Yes it does. Am I glad such alternatives exist to "Colorless, Odorless, Tasteless, Expensive Credentialling". Between Stanford or MIT and an online course I would definitely go to the Physical school. But between a tier 2 Indian Univ, I would prefer an online education and use a university only for a credential.
Good classes are hard to make and run. Technological facilitation can make a good class better and it can bring a good class to the world, but the limiting factor here is still quality.
As an aside, Thrun also demonstrated that in many cases those who "do," cannot teach. And he should continue to "do," and find better teachers to do the teaching.