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Professor Resigns From Stanford To Launch Online Education Project

Posted by Soulskill on from the distributing-bits-of-knowledge dept.

mikejuk writes "Professor Sebastian Thrun has given up his Stanford position to start Udacity — an online educational venture. Udacity's first two free courses are Building a Search Engine and Programming a Robotic Car. In a moving speech at the Digital Life Design conference, he explained that after presenting the online AI course to thousands of students he could no longer teach at Stanford: 'Now that I saw the true power of education, there is no turning back. It's like a drug. I won't be able to teach 200 students again, in a conventional classroom setting.' Let's hope Udacity works out; Stanford is a tough act to follow."

1 of 162 comments (clear)

  1. This is a big deal by jholyhead · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Thrun is (I think) the first tenured Professor at a major University to stand down in order to try to bring learning online. Unlike the offerings from Stanford, MIT, Berkeley etc etc, Udacity wont be under the same "Don't damage the university's business model" constraint, so they are truly free to go for broke.

    There has been a lot of criticism of the AI course - most of it by people who didn't attend beyond the first couple of weeks. I finished the course and had a good time doing it. It wasn't without flaws, but I have no doubt that with the necessary financial backing, they can make the necessary improvements and push on to create some remarkable content.

    If they can solve the question of certification, they, and those who will inevitably follow, might just revolutionise the educational landscape.

    And if it all goes wrong, Google wont kick him out of bed.