An example?
I can't remember which company this story was from (I think it was Lotus Software).
Basically the HR team of a multi-billion dollar startup were given the anonymised resumes of the first 10-20 founding team members.
HR rejected them all. Not one founding team member was accepted even for a short interview.
Tells you something about HR doesn't it?
First class universities are really great at bringing together smart people, money and difficult problems all into one area.
For the vast majority of non-smart people however it frankly just isn't worth it. The vast majority of jobs held by people from third and second tier universities do not need a degree - they just need to be qualified to do a specific job.
Udacity will stand in between second/third tier students and second/third tier business and match them like eBay does with buyers and sellers. This is worth a lot of money.
Re: HR and founders- that's true in most successful startups. Their value is not what they can technically do. It is the fact that they did everything they could to make it happen. It is a totally different skill set than being an employee of a Company, where people look for people with repeatable, proven skills.
Most people taking these courses are not college-aged students. Universities continue to be valuable, but it's important to constantly renew your skill set and make this knowledge and resources accessible to as many people as possible.
I'm thrilled to see VC funding go into this. I've taken 1 Udacity and 1 Stanford course and both have been a great experience (although I prefer udacity). It might not help me get my next job, but the structure is excellent and definitely promotes more hands-on learning than I have seen in the classroom.
>So, for instance, Google will offer an HTML5 game development course co-taught by two of its employees. HTML5 game development is a skill that’s useful in industry but not deeply academic, and something slow-moving universities are unlikely to offer for a while, Thrun noted.
I am really curious to see how this works out.
Does anyone know if udacity is modeling for a connected-learning experience? From the course requirements for the above course[1], it seems to be going this way:
>Basic knowledge of HTML, Javascript, and how the web works is necessary for this course. There is an optional unit on HTML and Javascript to help get you up-to-speed. If you have a basic understanding of how the web is structured at the level of CS253: Web Application Engineering, you should be fine.
Why would somebody invest in Udacity now?
But Coursera fundamentally has the same problem that Hulu has, they are just a platform for distributing content. Hulu is toally at the mercy of the media industry, likewise, Coursera is totally at the mercy of the universities. Now, it is possible that universities will be more giving to Coursera than the big media studios are to Hulu and this won't actually be a problem for Coursera. But it really might actually be a problem if Coursera starts biting into their bottom line.
Thrun, on the other hand, is happy to blow the whole higher ed system up if he can. He is way more outwardly ambitious[1]. This adversarial relationship with the universities might end up killing his strategy, as is consistent with your 200 vs 14 courses number. But it might not, Udacity might just carve up enough of the territory that they really own that they aren't held hostage by the university system they are trying to replace.
[1] When I watch Andrew Ng or Daphne Koller talk about Coursera I notice their unwillingness to say the word "disrupt". I wonder if they are actually equally ambitious as Thurn, just unwilling to admit it, for the sake of not biting the hand that is currently feeding them very well.
I think their metrics should not be just based on total signup or total classes offered but how many students graduate with high level competency. It's the total graduates and their skillsets that have HR value at the end.
