Felix Salmon kindly put the questions I posted this week about Udacity to its founder, Sebastian Thrun, and wrote up a lengthy post about it here.
Thrun helps to explain some of the uncertainty about the relationship between his various employers (Stanford and Google) and his new start-up venture, Udacity.
Read the entire piece, as they say.
Two things got my attention:
On Stanford and Udacity:
Looked at from a 30,000-foot view, Stanford is the institution being disrupted here, it’s not the institution doing the disrupting.
I doubt that the Stanfords and Harvards of the world are worried about their own business models. As a friend told me, it’s a really exciting time to be a first rate university or a first rate teacher, but a terrible time to be a third rate university or third rate teacher. But even if Stanford can be secure in its future, it seems to me lamentable that Stanford isn’t leading the way in online learning instead of simply getting out of the way (as is implied in the Salmon piece).
On for-profit vs. non-profit:
And in response to the question why he organized Udacity as a for-profit venture rather than following his own inspiration, Khan Academy as a non-profit, Thrun said:
“for profit is not forced to make profit. I needed to get people together really fast, and it’s much easier to do that under the ways of a Silicon Valley company.”
I wonder what his Silicon Valley VC investors think of his view that for profit is not forced to make profit. Are VCs investing in social returns over financial returns these days?
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[...] the 3 programs discussed in this post, Udacity is the only for-profit (although Thrun’s comments on being for-profit are rather interesting). Udacity is currently running their first for-credit [...]
3 Comments
The reason Thrun had to start Udacity and take his model outside of Stanford is because the writing was on the wall that the university going to have to analyze how to go forward because his class was such a huge success and that was going to cause delays as has now happened with the numerous online classes that were supposed to start this quarter (http://www.cs101-class.org/). See below for a sample email that was sent out to students. I really hope Stanford does not prevent professors from putting their classes online – it would be a great loss. There is immense potential for online education to empower people.
Email sent to NLP students:
We hope you are as excited as we are for the forthcoming launch of Natural Language Processing! Unfortunately, we’ve just learned that the launch of the NLP class (and all our other online courses here) has been delayed for reasons beyond our control. We aren’t sure how long the delay will be – the range is from a few days to a week or possibly several weeks. We’ll let you know a firm date as soon as we possibly can.
We realize that some of you will have made plans based on the course starting January 23, so we apologize for any difficulties that the delay causes.
The good news is that the course is looking great, with some exciting lectures and fun assignments that we’re quite proud of, and we’re thrilled that over 45,000 of you have signed up!
See you soon online!
Dan Jurafsky and Chris Manning
Basically Stanford is great at creative disruptive technologies and now Stanford is disrupting itself (education) – they had to slow things down and figure out what it all means.
There are lots of uncertainties arount the concept behind Udacity and I am glad you clear out some points on here. The online education is the future for any educational institution and there are no two opinions on the matter realated to it! The questions you put are really adequate and I hope they do not remain as rhetoric ones, as more opionated individuals will give a light on them.