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Comment by avsbst | Hacker News Reader

"Udacity won't turn you into a world class computer scientist, but it is a wonderful way to learn and improve."

Exactly, Udacity is essentially a more interactive version of w3schools and other tutorial websites. With a more expansive collection of areas of study.

The problem stems from this statement, the crux of this post: "Is Sebastian Thrun's Udacity the future of higher education?"

That's where the negativity comes in. As you said, Udacity won't make you a world class computer scientists, but that's what universities like Stanford, MIT, UW, Michigan, Caltech, CMU and other top CS schools are /supposed/ to do.

If you want to learn what AI is generally about, Udacity can help. But if you want to build a career out it, and become and actual expert, these sites fall flat on their faces. By embracing Udacity and Coursera as tools of higher education, Stanford and universities that follow suit are damaging the quality of the education they provide.

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What a complete lack of imagination. You sound like someone who saw the first flight and said "pfft... 100 meters? I can do better on a bicycle".

Think about possibilities.

Imagine what can happen 10 years from now, when Udacity covers the whole curriculum of all major majors, not the few courses that they managed to build in few months of their existence so far.

Imagine what happens if they have 10 years to tweak and improve their lectures, based on feedback on data they gather from past students. They can only get better! (which is not the case in physical universities, due to rotation of lecturers and the fact that some of them were never good to begin with).

Imagine that they hire faculty to start doing real research project, the way MIT, Standford et al do, all coordinated via internet, live video calls etc. Imagine they do it so well that they are allowed to start giving Ph.D.s.

Imagine that they start giving master degrees via testing centers, after you pay a modest fee for taking the test (something they have already started doing).

Imagine that they start coordinating in-person study groups via meetup or some other such service, the way e.g. programmers self-organize and create "Android SF user group" and such.

Those are just 5 minutes ideas that I'm sure are not escaping Thrun - he's much smarter than I am.

The disruption here is zero cost. If they can maintain that and expand to offer more, better courses, it'll be massive.

Your analogy for the current argument is weak at best. A better one would be that:

I saw the first flight and then Wilbur and Orville went to my local railroad magnate and somehow convinced him to destroy half his trains and use their primitive plane for mass transport instead when I had already paid the train magnate most of my savings for a four year contract to haul my goods to a distant city. I'm already upset but I give the two people the benefit of the doubt and send my goods on their plane anyway because there's no alternative. It promptly crashes and burns and I lose all my money.

Are you arguing that Udacity in its current state will make you a world class computer scientist? Because that's what /I/ am arguing against. It is not currently anywhere near a replacement for the current higher education at Stanford. Look at the reviews above for evidence of this.

Edit: Sarcastic response to above commenter's statement about my imagination removed. Downvotes duly noted.

But if you want to build a career out it, and become and actual expert, these sites fall flat on their faces.

I don't think anyone believes that eight days spent learning how to build a driverless car will make you an expert in AI, but what if you followed up with similar, and increasingly challenging, courses for several hundred days like a traditional student would? Where then would you stand in relation to those who went to a traditional institution?

In other words: Is the problem the delivery mechanism or the lack of content, which should improve with time?

I agree, with time the amount of content could drastically increase and Udacity could become a more interactive, education oriented version of Wikipedia. Which would be amazing. Imagine tutorials for everything you could ever dream of!

But I also think it lacks mechanisms comparable to those found in higher education when it comes to fostering students problem solving and critical thinking skills.

One of the biggest challenges when it comes to teaching is figuring out how to help a student solve a problem without giving them the answer outright. Having been a TA at Stanford for two years now, I can say that I have never helped two students work through the same problem in the exact same way.

I fear that with Udacity, users will often reach points where they are stuck, even after hours of trying, and instead of being taught, they will receive the answer.

I can see it already happening in the forums and wikis there. Students can't solve a problem, and they get a solution posted for them. The value of in person education comes from having someone poke you and prod you just enough so that you figure out the problem, but not so much that you can't honestly say the answer wasn't given to you.

If Udacity can figure out how to do that, then I believe that it would rival any higher education system.

Great comment.

A question: in regular universities, students form learning groups. does the kind of learning you describe(somebody teaches somebody) happen inside those groups, or mostly happen only through TA's ?

>>If you want to learn what AI is generally about, Udacity can help. But if you want to build a career out it, and become and actual expert,

Isn't udacity and coursera aimed at college level education? you usually don't become a machine learning expert after college education, but you can have a career developing software(and maybe use machine learning). Maybe not a career at google but still a career.

Yes it is, and you're absolutely right. Nobody is an expert straight out of school. But school lays the foundation for future learning, and if you look at the reviews posted, almost all the posts talk about how easy the class was. It didn't challenge the students. It didn't push them. It didn't teach them. If the foundation isn't solid, then how can you build anything on it?

Remember, the people giving the reviews are stanford students. They are much better academically, and are used to much tougher courses than you're average college student.

On the other hand, i've seen a review from somebody in kenya i think, that said that those online courses are much much better than university courses offered in his country.

Also there are varying levels of difficulty at coursera,MITx and udacity. Someone in this thread said MITx course was challenging. So we still have to see if courses are challenging and to whom.

To address that statement, I'd say it's quite fair to assume that Udacity type model is the future of higher education. Of course, not Udacity as it stands now, but I don't think it's even 18 months old.

I'm sure they'll see the response, and adjust their approach to optimize everything.

The AI class experiment wasn't even a year ago. Udacity as its own entity is barely 6 months old.

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