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Professor Resigns From Stanford To Launch Online Education Project
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."
Thank god there is a teacher that is trying to teach. It is unfortunate that government has helped reduce the quality of education (most notably since the civil unrest in the 1960s). Other people have complained about the problems with the current state of education within the United States at a more fundamental level. There are other teachers that have written about why the current approaches are failing, while ignoring the government's motivation to reduce education quality. With more teachers that attempt to expose real concepts to students in ways that bypass government control, unencumbered by the education fees that rise quickly due to inflation, along with medical costs (no substitution of goods is possible to reduce the impact of inflation, i.e., no reduction in quality is possible, from the already poor quality present), the better society will become, removing the common ignorance and prejudice that prevents real growth.