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Comment by Kaveren | Hacker News Reader

> "I founded Udacity so that everyone in the world could get a chance for an education."

Why do so many companies feel the need to have a mission to improve the world? Seems disingenuous. There are already superior learning resources obtainable for free (I am aware Udacity offers some free courses). Udacity is not helping anyone get an education out of the generosity of their hearts, they aren't KhanAcademy.

Udacity's only real service is offering the intellectual proletariat who lack the will to read spoonfed information.

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They would argue that they're bringing the barrier down substantially.

In what way? They offer lower quality learning than is freely available for any topic they cover. Paid courses don't bring the barrier down very much.

I don't feel that the quality is an issue with Udacity. I once paid for an AI Nanodegree course (which I did not complete) and was very satisfied with the course material, assignments, support and evaluation process(es).

Maybe there are free university courses that will provide students with more in-depth knowledge but the Udacity courses are designed to be more job-ready and less academic and I think it does a good job at that.

Unless the course is objectively bad - giving wrong or misleading information, for example - having more always a good thing. Different people learn better from different styles of teaching.

I think people use the concept of different learning styles so that there can't be anyone who works harder or is smarter than any other person.

Video learning for topics that do not directly benefit from it (learning JavaScript, for example) are geared towards people who are lazy, because it requires them to think less. You can read MDN (which has beginner resources) and come out twice the programmer of any video course. With videos, it's easier to let information wash over you without having to work as hard, and as a side effect, you learn less.

Any technical course on Udacity I guarantee I could name multiple written ones that are just better.

It's lowest common denominator learning.

I wasn't talking about videos vs text, but about ways of explaining things. Some might learn better from MDN, others from Zed Shaw's Learn JavaScript The Hard Way, for example; neither is necessarily worse.

I had that experience in intro to statistics in college; I found the classes and the accompanying texts (written by the teacher) confusing, and it wasn't until I got an alternative textbook that I got the concepts. Yet most of my peers seemed to do OK, even those who usually struggled more than me, including in other math subjects.

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