I don’t usually blog on the weekends, but I’m gonna today. I’m in a manic mood with lots of things of interesting thing around me, and I want to share.
So, let’s talk about this interview with Sebastian Thrun, one of the champions of MOOCs. At least from the article, Thrun sounds like the very model of a modern international mega-millionaire. A TED-talk in the morning and a bike trip on a $5,000 bicycle in the afternoon.
Thrun says that despite being one of the leading MOOC visionaries, he thinks that the model is a failure. Very few people, only 7%, finish the classes.
I’m a glass half full sort of gal and think that 7% is surprising and great. It’s a free class! It’s open to anyone! There are no admission filters! There are no downsides to failure! A good number of people are curious bystanders like me who has signed up for a MOOC here and there. 7% is such a good number that I’m revising my previous luke-warm reaction to MOOCs.
I like Thrun’s parenting style.
Thrun’s 5-year-old son, Jasper, is not yet old enough to be impressed by his father’s work, but he’s already starting his education. “In my son’s kindergarten, they’re telling us how to get him into Stanford,” he says. “By their advice, I’m doing everything wrong, because I’m trying to make him happy rather than putting him through as many piano lessons as possible.” He dreams that his son will take a less conventional view of education. “I hope he can hit the workforce relatively early and engage in lifelong education,” Thrun says. “I wish to do away with the idea of spending one big chunk of time learning.”
Apt. 11d 
That’s a 7% completion rate, though, not a success rate. What I thought was interesting was the San Jose state experiment in which they found that the success rate of remedial math students in the online course was much worse than those in the face to face course (would be interesting to do with a random sampling). The comments in the article are also interesting — one of the first comments I read described the experience of finding, say, the statistics class quite useful until, as the poster said, the difficulty level of the lesson “spiked.” I don’t know if it really spiked (i.e. the course slowly through conceptual easy material until reaching a difficult level), or if the difficulty was internal to the student, but I think that’s where a lot of these courses fail. When I’ve tried to play with them, I find them useful for review and for casual learning, but not for learning difficult material.
I think the online model might work for where he’s shifting his company — certification in vocational (though high level ones) skills (like learning a new programming language, or a new tool). I think online learning will be useful for language learning, too, combined with videos, and the video-conferencing with native speakers in the language you are learning.
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It’s not free. It’s a for-profit company operating presently at a loss, isn’t it?
You might feel 7% is great if it were a free, open alternative. Fine.
What if it were the only education option your children were offered? Because that’s the way the people pushing it in the media have framed it. It will “replace” high school/college/you name it.
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No! It’s not a replacement. It’s a supplement. It’s a resource for people who have no other resources. And, yes, it’s totally free. That’s the whole idea. You can take a class on poetry by a Univ of Penn prof right now if you like.
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It may be free now, but it is not structured as a nonprofit. It is backed by venture capital money. VCs are not known for giving things away.
http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2012/01/31/udacitys-model/
I asked Thrun about this, too, and he replied by saying that “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.”
Certainly the speed with which Udacity launched, complete with a high-quality staff, is testament to the natural velocity with which things get done in Silicon Valley. Driving the launch was seed funding from Charles River Ventures, while the site’s jobs page proudly offers “Competitive salary, benefits, and Series A stock options” to anybody thinking about working at Udacity.
It is not free according to its FAQs:
All Udacity courses give you free access to our courseware, but for a select number of courses you can enroll in the full course experience. This gives you access to projects, code-review and feedback, a personal coach, and verified certificates.
You can find these courses in the catalog by looking for this icon: Udacity Full Course
The price varies depending on the course. All prices are given per month. You can find the price on the Course Overview page along with an estimate for how long the course will take to complete.
Sample courses available for enrollment include: Exploratory Data Analysis, Introduction to Hadoop and MapReduce, Introduction to Data Science, Data Wrangling with MongoDB, and Introduction to Salesforce App Development. We’re expanding this list, so keep an eye out for new additions!
https://www.udacity.com/faq
Today, the courses which are available for enrollment cost $150 a month. ($105 with a 30% early enrollment discount.)
It’s not free now, and the price can always rise. The list is expanding. The staff will expect to be paid, because they like to eat, and the VC guys will also want a return on their investment.
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Look, I had an hour long interview and then about ten follow up e-mails with the woman who set up the competition to Udacity. It is free. The whole idea behind MOOCs are that they are free and open to all. There are plenty of online classes that aren’t free, but they aren’t called MOOCs. The M in MOOC stands for Massive. The second O is for open.
MOOCS don’t provide college credit, just certifications. In the few cases that they do offer college credit, then they have to hire staff to do traditional grading and therefore need to charge for that service.
VC is backing it, because they care about traffic more than $$. Twitter isn’t profitable yet. I’m not even sure Amazon is profitable yet. Sure, they expect to make money down the line with Twitter, Amazon, and MOOCS, but they tech-VC policy is always traffic first, profit later. MOOCs are indeed pulling in amazing numbers. They could make money just with google ads in the margins.
The lovely woman I spoke with said she doesn’t know to make money yet. But charging students for certifcate based programs was never part of the plan. She thought that if they got really good at training students, then maybe employers would pay them to find out who the best students were.
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Udacity seems to have a plan in place for profit/funding — by having corporate backers pay for the development of the courses for which they would like to see certification, but to make those courses available to everyone without users paying. The second part of the article talks about some courses funded by AT&T and other corporate entities who see it as a way of offering the training to everyone in the hopes of having a big labor pool to draw from. So, you get trained on your own time, then AT&T considers whether they want to hire you.
I think the question of whether it’s “free’ is a semantic distinction — of course, nothing is actually free. But, it might be free to use, if someone else is paying for it. I think Udacity is moving towards finding someone to pay. Some of the other services might rely on the online courses being a form of marketing.
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A lot of people involved in the earlier versions of these kinds of things are pretty pissed off about Udacity and Coursera calling themselves “open” (whether free or not). Their stuff is propriety. You can’t share the course materials elsewhere. I think, too, there’s a fear that it’s really available to the haves and not the have nots. One does need a good computer and Internet access to really take advantage of these courses.
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I must be throwing the curve downwards. I regularly sign up for courses so I can browse the information but right now (two little kids, full-time job, writing on the side) I can’t really commit to doing all the work to get right through the course. I have assumed that’s fine.
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