I took their Self-driving car Nanodegree and it was hands down the best online course I've ever taken in my life (and I took some crazy courses from MIT and Stanford). Where else could you end up with a capstone of actually programming a real self-driving car that is then running your code on some course in Mountain View?
Offerings right now:
1. If you want academic rigor only, go with edX
2. If you want academic rigor and some more approachable/practical courses, go with Coursera; or if you want to do full MS/MBA/MSA online (they have the widest selection right now comparing to edX/Udacity)
3. If you want unique practical skills in hot areas like self-driving/flying cars, deep (reinforcement) learning etc. without fully committing to rigorous practices, go with Udacity
4. If you need anything else, go with Udemy, Masterclass, School of AI and similar
Would it be a private, subsidies free school, or a public one? Quite likely the actual cost of a public school will be 10 or 100 more than you have to pay in tuition.
A public school - but ultimately that makes little difference to me as the consumer.
Furthermore, none of the MOOC providers have cracked the issue of credibility to employers, if I felt an Udacity nanodegree would be taken as seriously as a 'real' masters degree then I'd be willing to pay much more for it.
But when I'm just doing them more for self-fulfillment (as I'm sceptical employers give much credit to Coursera, Udacity etc.) then paying any more than 50 euros doesn't make sense.
What most students don't realize is that education is Europe is heavily subsidized. What are the fees for international students? That gives a more accurate picture of the cost.
Of course it is heavily subsidized. Everyone knows that all our education is paid through taxes.
And that is how it should be. Because it makes a better society for all. More highly educated people gives more productivity and prosperity for all. That it isn't your parent's wealth that decides what school you can go to decreases inequality and we get less people that feel that they never got a chance in life.
Atleast in Germany it is free for international students in many states. In some states where it is not completely free for international students, the fees is still pretty low.
"4. If you need anything else, go with Udemy, Masterclass, School of AI and similar"
+. I am huge udemy fan. I love that profits get back to the creator of the content. Usually, I wait until there is a good sale then pick up a security [1] course for $10. The teachers are positive and reply back to me. I think the only way this model could work is if Udemy had a total of 5 employees and took a small fee. VCs need to get out of this business - these aren't unicorns.
This comment doesn't make a lot of sense. Udemy is a 2500 person company (https://www.linkedin.com/company/udemy/). It is awesome that the profits are 50% shared with the creator of the course. There are many smaller Udemy clones that take less of a percentage but will offer fewer sales.
There really aren't any companies that compete with Udemy. Why would a course creator accept 0.1% of the sales Udemy brings, in exchange for a slightly smaller fee?
Competitors to Udemy really need to do better marketing. The fee doesn't matter.
I was driving south on 101 in Mt. View and a car came out of the left lane and cut me off to take the 85S exit. Was that your code? (The responsible thing is to use a linter to catch these things so they don't become "runtime" errors.)
Path-planning algorithm might have been set to "racing mode" and your driving was evaluated as non-threatening/non-colliding for the duration of the maneuver ;-)
At EPFL we're trying a model with the Extension School that is somewhere between 2 and 3. We don't quite do flying cars (yet) but we're developing more and more advanced material - and the big plus being that learners in the programs get a diploma (e.g. https://exts.epfl.ch/courses-programs/applied-data-science-m...).
I do think that universities should invest more heavily in this mix, obviously without losing their strong standing in 1.
Where else could you end up with a capstone of actually programming a real self-driving car that is then running your code on some course in Mountain View?
You can get all that and more if you actually went to university.
Yeah, you'd have to go to schools in California because Mountain View is in California and the big programs are at Stanford, Berkeley, etc.
My alma mater is actually building its own mobility research center in Flint, MI. Home of the lead poisoned peasants. And my alma mater isn't that well respected.
It only costs hundreds of thousands if you get no scholarships, did no curricular activities, took no AP courses, and didn't do well in school in general.
Most schools will provide students with academic scholarships. My school paid for the first year of my schooling because of my GPA and test scores.
Plus I'm pretty sure getting into Kettering University is a lot easier than Stanford. They didn't even have an admissions essay when I applied.
Whatever problems Udacity may have as a business, I will always be thankful bc they're responsible for me getting into software development as a career. CS 253, Intro to Web Development by Steve Huffman of Reddit, was an incredible introduction into full stack development.
Udacity has always taken bold bets about the future of education, and I sincerely hope that they survive and thrive, simply because of their willingness to push the envelope.
I completely agree. Udacity was the one that helped me move into my career in data analytics. I took Thrun's excellent Intro to Stats[1] class to brush up my Stats skills along with some other courses such as Intro to Descriptive Stats[2] and Intro to Inferential Stats[3].
I can also say that while that particular course was not formative for me (I took and enjoyed it, but it wasn't what got me into programming), I also can attribute at least the start of my career to Udacity. The CS101 course Udacity offered in Python many years ago was what really gave me the confidence to enter the dev scene and to start thinking about things as a real software engineer instead of hacking things together as I always had in the past.
Same here. I took the CS101 course then went into CS 253 and it's what pushed me towards a career as a web dev. 5 years in and I'd say it's worked out.
I'll be forever grateful to Udacity for that but I'm sure it's difficult for them to meet their business goals. I have friends ask me how I got into web dev and I've tried to point them to Udacity but with all of their focus on Nanodegrees people think that's all they offer and balk at the high price point. Now I usually say to look for a Udemy course on sale for $10 or a course from Wes Bos. Which is a shame because I find the instruction and format of Udacity to be high quality.
I also subscribe. Having a non-technical background, CS101 and CS253 were essential for the start of my career in web development. And even though at the time (2014) I went with PHP to get my first dev job, I soon returned to Python because of that strong foundation.
Echoing this. Took their intro to CS with Sebastian Thrunn around my senior year of high school, and it made me decide to get a degree in CS. 6 years later, i work as a dev, so I definitely feel like i owe some of it to taking that course
Yes! I just finished their python one (first real intro to coding for me), then moved to this. This got me going too. Not sure if I had even finished it before I started working a web app which on my current full time job.
Another round of layoffs in only a few months, things are not looking good for the company. Udacity cut 125 employees in November 2018 [1], just five months ago. Just before that 25 people were cut around August/September 2018 [2].
I have several friends who used to work there -- there has been 3 other rounds of layoffs in the last few years (not including the ones you mentioned).
The players in the industry that went after enterprises are doing well, the players that stuck to selling mostly to individual customers are having a rough go of it. Udacity definitely had some big enterprise deals with their specific nanodegrees, but it never looked like they became an enterprise sales company from the outside.
I believe most marketing departments (along with people trying to make a name for themselves) have massively cranked up the amount of free content they pump out in the last few years. It is making it terribly difficult to become big in the education space while selling to the masses.
Enterprises, on the other hand, _really_ want to lower their salary expenditures through training and will happily throw money at a company like Pluralsight to train up new employees. For what its worth, I think they're correct that training can drive down payroll costs. But the company I worked for was acquired by Pluralsight, so there's some bias.
> The players in the industry that went after enterprises are doing well, the players that stuck to selling mostly to individual customers are having a rough go of it.
Keep in mind they had a deal with Georgia Tech's OMSCS, but something went awry there too.
The ink wasn’t even dry on the OMSCS deal when Udacity did their “pivot” to Nanodegrees. They lived up to the letter of the agreement with GT—in fact Udacity is still the classroom platform for OMSCS classes—but they went in a completely different direction as a company with a product that effectively competes with OMSCS.
It’s not hard to see why: GT said recently that through 5 years of operation the OMSCS has made $14M for the school. That’s wonderful from their perspective, but that’s a total disaster for a VC-funded unicorn company.
Well, yeah, but there's always another video you can watch.
The problem is more the overall devaluing of content prices by consumers generally. Especially absent much in the way of certification value for most people, that places a real ceiling on how much you can charge. I might pay something in the neighborhood of book pricing for an online course (or I may take one of the numerous free alternatives). But I'm unlikely to pay triple digits and I certainly won't pay thousands of dollars.
"Last year, Udacity generated about $90 million in revenue.
Even as Udacity slashes costs and headcount, it’s trying to expand its enterprise business, which has had recent success. Udacity now has contracts with 60 enterprise customers, including AT&T and PricewaterhouseCoopers. Airbus and Audi recently signed on, as well."
Anecdotally, a fair number of companies seem to be tapping various providers that were originally mostly B2C as a way to bulk up company or technology-specific online training libraries with a catalog that addresses both more general skills and personal development.
I don't know what this looks like as a business but I can imagine it's easier to sell a relatively modest number of business subscriptions than it is to beat the bushes for a lot of retail $10-50 courses.
I like what udacity is doing overall but I think they've failed to really comprehend the nature of the education industry in the United States. Overall, the biggest problems are simply perceptions by employers in terms of what is considered a quality education. First, employers don't view self-studied or online education to be good. Second problem is employers overwhelmingly gravitate towards traditional degrees from government or private universities. This ends up corrupting the entire fabric of education.
Students, seeking some sort of way to make themselves marketable in the job market, will only obtain education if it results in some sort of valuable degree. Hence the reason people are willing to spend hundreds of thousands to obtain these degrees.
If you really want to disrupt education then you need to be directly figuring out how to change those perceptions. Start with the basics of making educational courses that would be considered the best in the world and then leverage the powerful benefits of an internet connected computer to create the best learning experience for the student. You don't need to reinvent the wheel. The way universities are teaching now is good but it is just not efficient and too costly overall. Take what works from traditional universities and then solve the weaknesses through the benefits of a computer.
When I took udacity courses I just felt that the quality wasn't fully there. They felt more like something that would be a supplemental project you would take if you were studying a traditional course. You still need a way to obtain those key foundation skills before tackling the bigger projects.
Ultimately, education is 2nd only to defense as an industry. Relative to the hype (and to what I think the potential is), computers and the internet haven't impacted the industry much. At least, at first glance. At second glance, I think you'll find huge changes in how people learn things informally. I don't even mean doing online courses on the side. I mean blogs and PDFs and stackoverflow.
If you can program, bake or pick locks, there's a good chance you learned online. Online learning has also been supporting the "we don't train employees" norms of the modern knowledge economy. The internet is a huge part of how people learn, it just isn't a big part of education. This is one of the reasons I think there is a lot of potential for major disruptions.
If you try tackling credentials in a college-like way, this risks leaning into old paradigms and not really changing much. You'll never complete with Harvard on prestige, but you can probably compete on everything else (from social aspects to educational ones) with enough determination.
Idk what the answers are for udacity, but overall I think the best approach is meandering discovery rather than point-and-row. Taking steps back is part of that.
Udacity does a Masters of Science of CS with Georgia Tech for 7k. I hear most of the courses there are high quality and very rigorous... Perhaps they only need to apply that philosophy to smaller modules instead of a 12-course MS.
I am currently enrolled in that program. The program is great (I still don't believe it is so cheap). But it is not because of Udacity. It is great thanks to Piazza, professors, TAs, remote office hours, projects, students, Canvas, Slack groups, OMSCS subreddit, GaTech HPC clusters, remote labs, software licenses, student perks, and various other internal GaTech services. Udacity is just a small tool there to present a list of videos. Not a lot of professors use it for anything else. Hell, on Piazza for most courses you can even find a YouTube playlist because the Udacity web and mobile apps are incredibly bad compared to plain YouTube.
Do we really want everything locked down and centralised or do we want a portfolio of tools, marketplaces and such adding up to an educational platform.
Sure. I think the point though is that the education provided through MOOCs like Udacity, etc. is a small part of what's needed for an educational program in most cases. After all, we've had recorded lectures for decades. For certain types of course material such as programming assignments, computer grading systems are useful as well. However, for the most part, online courses aren't really all that different from Great Courses DVDs or YouTube videos. Which is to say nice resources but not very transformative.
Being able to use the Internet to learn things is pretty transformative in aggregate of which MOOCs is a small piece. (Although, arguably, it hasn't really been transformative in the sense of the educational certifications required for most jobs, whether at the university level or specific established IT training certs.)
If you search around on HN there are more than a couple of threads speaking quite highly of this curricula. It’s probably the best MS in the world you can get in terms of value per dollar if you’re interested in applied CS.
> It’s probably the best MS in the world you can get in terms of value per dollar if you’re interested in applied CS.
It's worth pointing out, that in many parts of Europe Master's degree is either free, or costs less than 7k. Of course, the quality cannot be easily compared.
Free to the student perhaps, but generally the average cost (to whoever pays) of a year in college (masters/cs courses may be more) tends to be in the €10k-€15k range.
I guess that is a start. I would really like to see these courses enhanced by technology related tools. Personally I think the teaching method that is offered by codecadmey is genius.
I'm personally not in CS so I guess that is why my views are slightly different compared to everyone else here. I work in accounting field. In terms of quality online curriculum there is basically nothing. The ones offered on coursera are basically a joke.
It's really hard for me to associate online degrees with quality... End of the day it all depends on the person. The main value of a college education has always been the signaling, not the actual material
From what I've seen, the theory of degree signaling might actually be breaking down because employers are starting to use more assessment tools to evaluate potential employees.
I disagree. I've been in and out of FANG companies as a Software Engineer and in my experience the education factor has largely been an HR thing. It has literally never come up in interviews. I think your performance on technical interviews combined with behavioral factors are the sole determinant. I've had one non-FANG company turn me down (as I was leaving a FANG), because I didn't have a degree. They were pretty upfront with that though.
The quality difference is in the students, not the courses. Top brick and mortar schools are very hard to get into. Beyond that, some of them are even very hard to graduate from.
As an example, take the University of Waterloo (by no means a top school in the world, but definitely up there in Canada). For the math faculty, in 2018 we had 16,000 applicants for undergrad math programs and admitted 1,200. That's a 7.5% acceptance rate. Beyond that, we regularly see upwards of 30% of first years fail one or more of their courses. Many of these fail two courses and are asked to withdraw.
You just don't see that with online courses. Anyone can take them and the high percentage who never complete the course are assumed to have lost interest, likely due to a lack of significant investment in the program. Brick and mortar universities signal serious commitment in time and money on the part of the student, in addition to ability.
> Many of these fail two courses and are asked to withdraw.
Wait, after a single failed course?! That seems... cruel to do to people straight out of high school. I failed linear algebra 1 (sort of by accident). But here in a European country, people fail stuff regularly, only like the top 40% maybe have "clean years" every year, actually some very good students sometimes fail stuff too when I think about it.
No, you are asked to withdraw if you fail 2 math courses out of the 5 courses you take in your first term. Most people take 2 math courses, a CS course, an English course (required), and an elective.
You can fail your elective and they won't care, but that's really unusual since people choose easier courses for that.
It is logical people have this view these days because the early versions of online courses were very weak in quality. Quite literally they were PDF scans of homework, a PDF syllabus, instructions on what to do (what chapters to read, when to submit stuff etc.) and power point slides. That was it. If you were lucky, you got video taped lectures from in-person classes.
There is a lot of potential with interactive media using a computer that never gets applied to these online courses because of the technical limitations of teachers and related support staff. It is hard to make really good online courses.
> Quite literally they were PDF scans of homework, a PDF syllabus, instructions on what to do (what chapters to read, when to submit stuff etc.) and power point slides. That was it. If you were lucky, you got video taped lectures from in-person classes.
If it's good enough for in-class, why is this approach insufficient for online? I actually prefer this exact setup when taking college classes online. I can rewatch portions of the lectures if necessary, and there's not a bunch of people asking disruptive questions.
> There is a lot of potential with interactive media using a computer that never gets applied to these online courses because of the technical limitations of teachers and related support staff
I don't feel much of these types of things have been superior to books.
At the same time online is shit for direct interpersonal communication, so that's the strongest tool teaching has out the window.
The best you can get online is one on one video calls, and while not too much worse compared to real face to face conversations, you will be hard pressed to get live video to web scale.
Discussion forums are one part of MOOCs that basically don't work at all. For technical courses that roll out on a schedule (which are probably not as common any longer), they're vaguely useful for platform issues and maybe some points of particularly common confusion. But they're swamped with people who are clearly way out of their depth, e.g. have no idea how to even begin to setup a required programming environment on their system.
From there, it descends into the absolute dumpster fire that is any sort of real discussion around less technical topics.
Some of the early versions of online courses like OCW weren't actually intended to be used "out of the box" as courses though. They were explicitly intended to be resources that teachers could use and adapt to create courses tailored to the needs of a group of students. (I'm not sure how much actual cross-pollination there was, but OCW would seem to have grown out of some of the same thinking as One Laptop per Child.)
As it turned out, OCW ended up overshadowed by the various straight to consumer MOOCs.
Not sure how it works in US universities, but in European universities degrees usually requires one to have written a master's or bachelor's thesis. These are what really sets apart the excellent from the merely good or average students. It is the hardest part of the curriculum since the students have to plan their work themselves and work independently for half a year. Online degrees without reviewed theses (sp?) will always fall short in comparison.
I think there is still a lot of room to disrupt education in the US, and the unfortunate lesson of Udacity is that there really isn't a market for sub-academic degree granted by for-profit institutions.
I agree that the educational platform is really the way to innovate: community based learning, interactive platforms, and social goal setting are all possibilities that could help people leverage internet connectivity to learn. We've yet to see a truly "mobile first" educational platform, which connects experts to the knowledge gaps of the population "on demand". Maybe someday I'll fix a flat tire by taking a quick course, or connecting directly with an expert to walk me through the process!
I completed a bunch of courses at Udacity before they introduced the Nanodegree programs. I enjoyed the experience and gained useful knowledge in areas that my regular degree program didn't cover (brushed up on Stats, Python web programming, JavaScript graphics, etc), but free courses doesn't seem like a viable business platform.
The Nanodegree programs are not free, and from the courses that are included it's clear that you would gain valuable skills, but are they recognized as a qualification in industry at large? I'm sure some employers would consider them, but would enough employers?
Regardless, it's a fantastic service that they offer, and I'm grateful for it. Hopefully they can keep the ball rolling and pivot to a place that is profitable enough for them to continue.
I felt cheated by the Nanodegrees. They were taught by embodiments of the fake-it-till-you-make-it philosophy.
At least, the React one was. When I asked questions about the errors I was getting, Richard Kalehoff —- the literal face of the course! — answered and clearly did not know what was going on. He told me things that flatly contradicted the documentation and couldn’t do much more than to say “try copying the example”.
To my shame, I paid $800 to learn from people who weren’t much farther ahead on the material, and in some aspects were behind me.
On the one hand, I wouldn't say it was a total waste of money. The production value of the videos was very good, the Jupyter notebooks were invaluable as practice, and the structure was passable.
On the other hand, I felt like they should've focused more on having deeper courses. It tried going into too many topics in such a short amount of time. To add, the amount of lecture material was far too small compared to a typical university course, which I was okay with since some university's posted related lecture material online.
In retrospect, it was a fine course as an introduction, but as a paid course for a Nanodegree I wouldn't have recommended it to others. I think people would be better off spending that money on books which go far deeper into whatever material they are interested in, alongside watching university video lectures on YouTube, reading personal posts by practicing experts and research papers.
There wasn’t enough innovation. What they offer is replaceable instantly by any single university in the world which offers a course for free and hosted on YouTube.
I don’t have a solution but I think online education has not been solved. Clearly there is a lot of innovation but nobody is making it.
One of the strangest things about the MOOC boom in 2012/13 was the fact that so much of what they were doing already existed.
Taking a pre-existing paid-for product and giving it away for free is not innovation, especially when you can only give it away for free because of external funding.
Finding a way to provide quality, accredited credit hours for 1/5th of what you'd pay at a community college, and at the same time opening the doors to federal funding dollars, should have been a paramount goal.
The problem is if it's accredited then instead of just offering reviewed "iterate till you pass" programming projects, they will have to have high stakes "cram and regurgitate" style exams which are a staple of accredited higher ed. If you go for that stuff, why not just enroll in a university somewhere?
That is precisely the conclusion the market has come to, and why they are having issues. Though their target audience is actually the professional working folk.. who don’t have the motivation and time to work on deadlines projects or the willpower to finish non deadlines projects and hw. Overall the business case seems difficult
>or the willpower to finish non deadlines projects and hw
If I could nitpick this particular point (because I agree with the rest), statistically it's true that the vast majority of online courses aren't finished.
But I think, going by my own use of these courses as well as anecdotes from others, this isn't because of a lack of willpower so much as professional working folk primarily being interested in learning a very specific solution-to-a-problem on-demand (exactly the thing Stack Overflow offers) rather than going through an entire course just because lots of other information happens to be bundled with the key information they're actually looking for.
There are of course many exceptions. I wanted to learn how hardware works so went through the entire Nand 2 Tetris course start to finish. But that was because independent of my "professional working folk" persona, I was just personally interested in the topic. But I've much more often used online lectures to get me over occasional humps in understanding specific nuggets of information and this is the use case I've heard from everyone else I know who uses online courses.
Dr. David Harpool talks about this in his book survivor college. Basically argues that the market aka the board makes horrible decisions for education.
>What they offer is replaceable instantly by any single university in the world which offers a course for free and hosted on YouTube.
I completely agree with this.
>I don’t have a solution but I think online education has not been solved. Clearly there is a lot of innovation but nobody is making it.
I don't think the problem is online education, I think problem with these ed-tech companies is that they still are trying compete with the credentialing system of universities without access to all the student loan debt the latter have access to.
Gotta love the choices HS graduates can get funneled into/ reinforced by mainstream opinion today: bootcamps, nanodegrees, or loading up on student loan debt if you can edge out agaisnt the legacy/bribery admits.
I think what people are really trying to solve is a cheaper credentialing system, that get's distorted by some of the incentives involved.
even if they get their credentialling system to be “accepted”, they have not solved the root issue which is the elephant in the room: their credentials are not trustworthy because anyone can easily cheat their tests.
The other elephant in the room is that the rigor of their online courses.
Education is not a one size fits all - you cannot offer the same from MIT vs community college no matter if the course content is the same. The difficulty (proxied by the reputation of the school) of the same courses vary wildly and dramatically, as does workload, peer support, TA support, exams, and even the pace and how the final grade is curved.
By necessity they cannot grade difficultly, since they are trying to get people to pay for courses like they are dessert. By necessity they cannot offer different tiers of difficulty based on entrance exams or other tests, since they would insult their customer base (the intuitive argument being that those in most need of such nanodegrees are inversely the ones who may do worse in general).
>their credentials are not trustworthy because anyone can easily cheat their tests.
One issue is that, especially in the context of a standardized online course, credentialing arguably runs somewhat counter to educational value. For example, organizations that offer technical certifications have to struggle with how specific to make their feedback so that someone who fails doesn't just look up the specific things they got wrong on a test and retake it. (Without materially changing their overall mastery of the material.)
>The other elephant in the room is that the rigor of their online courses.
I'm not sure that's universally true given in-depth problem sets, reading, etc. that a student dutifully works through. Of course, many will not and evaluation/feedback becomes more difficult as you move away from lecture formats and material that is amenable to computerized grading and evaluation.
But, as you suggest, most people are not really looking to spend the time they would need to in order to work through an MIT or Stanford curriculum, if indeed they are practically able to do so.
>The difficulty (proxied by the reputation of the school) of the same courses vary wildly and dramatically, as does workload, peer support, TA support, exams, and even the pace and how the final grade is curved.
This doesn't sound like education to me, but a system of schooling composed of these factors with varying weights of assumed importance that most people in a society choose/blindly accept to be the one and only equivalent to an education (and all the ills that come from this assumption).
The projects are certainly as rigorous anything you will get in any undergrad degree. The difference is the grading system. With Udacity, you have to hit every deliverable as if it were a paid contract, but you can keep going 'till you hit them all, since there's no deadline. In college, there's a deadline, but you can skip that one thing you couldn't quite get working, and still move on with a 'B', etc.
I think that's true. Deadlines do have some pedagogical value. When I did Udacity, it was pay by month, so there was a sense of time pressure in that every extra month burned cash. I think they switched to the flat fee now because too many people were blazing through in 2-4 months which is too bad because it took out the admittedly low pressure time aspect of the program.
> trying to compete with the credentialing system of universities
Which gets even more difficult when places like Georgia Tech are offering fully accredited Masters of Science in Comp Sci programs, delivered fully online, for a grand total of $7500 in tuition.
I don't think any sort of 'certificate' or accreditation approach was the right strategy for them. I was probably their prime candidate for paid certs -- I am a lawyer who self-studied CS for 4 years and just recently successfully switched careers to software dev. I took so many online courses -- Coursera, edX, MIT's OpenCourseWare, Stanford's online courses. In every interview I had, the interviewers were impressed by the fact I took such a variety of courses (I listed them on my resume, underneath my "real" education history.)
But not a single one ever even asked if I had obtained any sort of certificates from them. No one cared, not even for a second. The whole story you want to tell when you go this way is, "I got the practical learning and experience I needed; I didn't go for an official degree because I felt the piece of paper wasn't worth the money." The proof (for potential employers) that you succeeded is in your abilities -- specifically, your portfolio of personal projects you create and are ready to present. Taking all those online courses shows initiative, curiosity, passion for the field; a certificate of any sort from some place like Udacity means less than nothing.
Would it have mattered any more if it was accredited by some accrediting body? My intuition says no. Employers feel comfortable relying on traditional degrees because they're, well, traditional. There's the whole cultural significance of them, and of the experience of attending a four year program. But, right or wrong, the value of these degrees comes from the school name. Is it a nationally known school? Or a regionally known one? Is it a school in the city that your interviewer (or their coworkers) attended? But if you come to them with some accredited papers from Udacity, there is going to be a very wide respectability gap that will have to be crossed.
It's not an inspiring approach, but I can't help but feel like a bland subscription model is probably the best they could have done. Maybe they could have become Google's Pluralsight or something. I think there's still definitely room for 'disruption' in the online education space, but I think it's probably going to look and feel a lot more like traditional higher ed than many might have thought 5 years ago -- even to the extent that I think we'll see traditional schools leading the way, because those traditional schools come to the starting block already carrying a lot of cachet. Why pay for a piece of paper if the name at the top means nothing?
>Which gets even more difficult when places like Georgia Tech are offering fully accredited Masters of Science in Comp Sci programs, delivered fully online, for a grand total of $7500 in tuition… I don't think any sort of 'certificate' or accreditation approach was the right strategy for them… But not a single one ever even asked if I had obtained any sort of certificates from them. No one cared, not even for a second.
I agree (my personal experience was similar as a dropout with regards to getting a onsite software jobs, pretty easy when staying away from Big Tech™), they needed some other way, and tried to fight a battle that even traditional schools are finding themselves needing to step into (at least for CS).
>Would it have mattered any more if it was accredited by some accrediting body? My intuition says no. Employers feel comfortable relying on traditional degrees because they're, well, traditional. But, right or wrong
As someone who is constantly looking for alternatives that will fit for me for the types of problems I want to work on, this is the part that sucks to deal with. I enjoyed working/contracting for research labs in different (neuroimaging and a chemical engineering lab) fields than I had when pursing an undergraduate degree that I was only able to get because of someone I knew who could not only identify my interest, but vouch for me personally. From my experience, in the real world there is space for exceptions, but they have to be hacked around now, as there is no clean path. Maybe there is some entrepreneur out there with the right network/skills who could build an online product that could deliver that.
At this point, I can not be bothered paying to go through traditional academic routes because there is so much focus on optimizing for everything but moving a body of knowledge forward. When I see ed-tech companies try to emulate the existing system, I just have to laugh… at least until I see something different. I'm only 27, but I'd recommend to every future HS grad that wants more than the credential value of a degree and gives such a weight of 0, to just abandon all hope from getting that from universities.
When you watch a class on youtube no one is reviewing your projects. Obviously that is the difference. Do you think someone who watches CS193P on youtube is going to get the same out of it as someone who does the iOS nanodegree?
I would guess CS193P is probably more in depth just in their lecture content alone than the Nanodegree lecture content.
And I can't speak to every Nanodegree, but the projects I worked on in my Nanodegree were 'easy' enough that it wasn't hard for the reviewers to mark. There wasn't a ton of room for creativity. Most importantly, their feedback was pretty mixed in terms of how in-depth they went. Often, they'd just link me to posts from other real-life experts to the point where I felt like I was getting most of the 'juice' from outside of Udacity.
CS193P is a few lectures on Swift, a couple on MVC, and then the rest is just a different part of the iOS SDK every day. It's certainly good, and whenever they publish a new semester, I watch it, but it's not like there's some special Stanford magic there.
edX and Coursera also only offer certifications that you passed a class for money now.
You can still take the classes on your own but have no "proof" (It's arguable that certification has any value for your career, but I did like the "I unlocked an achievement!" feeling..)
The real problem for me as an investment in courses is Rate of return from Udacity. Their courses might be good but they are too expensive. In my country it is 100K. It is too expensive for most of the students and even professionals.
Also, most of the courses are comparable on other MOOC sites like Udemy and Coursera. Udemy is best you can get in $10 and it helps a lot.
I recently took AI course on Udemy for just $7 in sale and It is hands on course and I am really satisfied with it and the content. Even if it is not good I have not lost too much money. The value I got from that course far better than I would have got from udacity 100K ND courses.
Their Nano Degrees does not provide value in the industry and you can not expect a job after it. After spending 2term fee of college I expect something from the course but it way too expensive.
It's all hype you can do actually really good and get all the stuff and knowledge online. At the end for any job your knowledge will count.
An unemployed PHP web developer struggled for 2 years to get a job. She had taken time off to have children. In that time PHP had acquired pariah status.
I suggested that she do a Udacity "front end developer" course. A thousand dollars and 3 months later, she finished the course, found it valuable and obtained a job. She was promoted to project manager/leader a few months later.
For me personally, it comes down to cost and acceptability. I would like to pursue nanodegrees but the cost is much higher than Coursera - which has a monthly subscription model. Also, Coursera has an expanding offering of Master's degrees from world renowned Univerities which employers will accept (my employer - a Canadian Bank will even pay for online masters degrees) but nanodegrees seem like vaporware, if Udacity goes under how do I get my nanodegrees verified? If the cost were lower, i could take the risk.
Interviewed here at the end of 2015, so quite a while ago, but even back then, something just didn't _feel_ right about that place -- like they had their eye on everything but the ball -- raised a ton of money, hired a bunch of smart people, drinking plenty of the koolaid, but they weren't really focused so much on the problem if anyone wanted what they were selling...
It was a big vision and most startups fail, so maybe it's just they couldn't figure it out -- happens to most of us.
I took the deep reinforcement nanodegree and was disappointed. The course had several instructors, only one of whom I thought was a really good teacher.
When you're competing with free material like the David Silver lectures you need to produce something really awesome to justify a $1k cost. I think the potential was there, and the partnership with Unity helped, but overall it felt disorganized, outsourced, and of insufficient quality (after the first section which was awesome).
Hopefully Thrun brings a renewed focus on course quality as well.
I don't know anything about the business or cultural elements of Udacity, but they have such high quality of courses that this makes me genuinely sad. I hope they can figure out a business model - even if it leans B2B vs. B2C.
I don’t think it’s clear from the customer perspective what you really get for $1k. Sure, it’s a lot cheaper than going to school but if it means nothing to an employer than psychologically it feels like money spent rather than money invested. I’m sure they have partnerships with some cos to offer to their employees but seems like investing on enterprise sales for employee training could be a more fruitful route than b2c.
I'm not sure this is the case here, but one thing I notice is that competitive environments (i.e. non natural monopoly businesses) do catch up with businesses eventually. I don't think this should prevent VCs from investing (esp early stage), as great success can be achieved when capturing a market - but in the long run pricing pressures do force the business towards tighter margins.
I like their model of education which focuses on highly targeted technical skills to be completed in 3-6 months. Continuing education is an interesting beast. The transitional educational opportunities are often out of sync for a working professional. We don’t need a second bachelors or a masters but rather an in-depth course to get us up to speed where we’re lacking.
It still feels like 3-6 months is far too short for a curriculum for people making career changes, as there is a great deal of depth for each topic covered.
For example, in their Robotics Software Engineering degree, one of the topics they cover is Mapping and SLAM. That topic alone is a full university course and a specialization, i.e. Cyrill Stachniss' lectures on YouTube.
I think online courses try too hard to squeeze too much material in a short time, whereby students only acquire a superficial understanding of a topic.
That sucks. The site has some damn amazing content given the low cost (free!). For example, their courses on theoretical computer science and compiler theory are pretty great. But... I already have a degree so I can't see myself paying for a nanodegree. Hopefully, someone else will pay for it to keep the site running.
Not surprised things aren't doing too well. I'm part of the deep learning nanodegree sponsored by Facebook (amazing course IMO). Two of the people in charge of our group from Udacity left back to back. I knew something weird was happening and this shows me why they left.
I loved many of their individual courses at the beginning but now everything is just bundled into their nanodegree programs.
While Udacity helped kick-start many similar online self-learning business models, but ultimately I believe they failed in their scaling effort.
Their nanodegree programs often feel a little overpriced. I remember their mission was to democratize online education, but at those prices I'm not so sure. I tried it once and their support really left a lot to be desired.
I want Udacity to succeed as a business. The amazing course content of Udacity especially in AI and Machine Learning has no parallels when it comes to actually accomplishing something novel(for the student). If you take self driving car nanodegree, you will at the end of course be able to code actual software for the car.
Hope they manage to fix their operations. Udacity is hands down the best MOOC. Their courses are professionally produced, with great visualizations, animations, and superb projects. I've already completed courses in Udemy, Coursera, PluralSight, and edX. Udacity is a level above everybody else.
I signed up for the very first Udacity class when it was first announced. I took several more in 2011 and 2012. I haven't logged into the site for a while.
It's sad to see that they weren't able to figure things out.
It seems like being academically excellent and being successful in industry are totally different things. I still remember the hype about Udacity and Coursera a few years ago.
Beside VmWare and Akamai, I haven't seen any company founded by university faculty that have survived and made impact (even though VMware was tiny compared to what it is today when EMC acquired them)
>I haven't seen any company founded by university faculty that have survived and made impact
Bose, Broadcom, Qualcomm, Financial Engines, Genentech, MathWorks, Boston Dynamics, Pixar (I think it counts), Arista Networks, MIPS, Rambus, Duolingo, Sun Microsystems. Depending on what your cut off is for made an impact, I'm sure there are dozens more from Stanford alone.
Akamai's CEO, Dr. Tom Leighton's math class at MIT, still my all-time favorite. It change my life, since I thought I will never be able to understand math above high school algebra.
Gilber Strang's linear algebra and Stewart's calcus is the other two.
Offerings right now:
1. If you want academic rigor only, go with edX
2. If you want academic rigor and some more approachable/practical courses, go with Coursera; or if you want to do full MS/MBA/MSA online (they have the widest selection right now comparing to edX/Udacity)
3. If you want unique practical skills in hot areas like self-driving/flying cars, deep (reinforcement) learning etc. without fully committing to rigorous practices, go with Udacity
4. If you need anything else, go with Udemy, Masterclass, School of AI and similar