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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."

28 of 162 comments (clear)

  1. Gack! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Hope it turns out better than his class did. The other classes were far better managed than the AI course.

  2. I'm curious, by Mitchell314 · · Score: 2

    how will it be monetized, and I don't mean that in a negative way. (also, bad first link in summary)

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    I read TFA and all I got was this lousy cookie
    1. Re:I'm curious, by Dr+Max · · Score: 2

      I would of happily paid $100 for the ai class, and the class had over 100 000 people in it, that's $10 000 000. Also advertising on the site would do well.

      --
      Rocket Surgeon.
    2. Re:I'm curious, by blackfrancis75 · · Score: 2

      I don't think you should discount the marginal cost of infrastructure to support that many people streaming online video content, engaging in interactive graded exercises and submitting questions. No, I'm not saying it's anywhere near the cost of supporting that many people in-real-life; which is why we're not comparing it to the marginal gain of one student's university tuition fees.
      Say you'd have x people who are willing to pay $y - does x*y cover the ongoing hosting/content development/web development costs? It might do, but the fact that one participant was willing to pay $100 for the course is nigh on irrelevant.

    3. Re:I'm curious, by Bing+Tsher+E · · Score: 2

      Quitting his professorship at Stanford to try to monetize the concept seems like an awful big risk to me.

      Was he a tenure-track full professor, or just someone hired as a lecturer? I couldn't find any details about that.

    4. Re:I'm curious, by malilo · · Score: 3, Interesting

      An Associate Professor IS tenured. It's what your title is just after getting tenure. How they keep you on the hook "being a good boy/girl" is to dangle full professorship in front of you (it comes with more money, not just a nice title). In most cases, if you don't make full professor a few years after associate, you don't ever get it. BTW, ''Assistant Professor' is what you are called pre-tenure.

      --
      "sometimes he felt that his whole life was a dream, and he wondered whose it was and whether they were enjoying it."
    5. Re:I'm curious, by elashish14 · · Score: 2

      At Stanford, he was a research professor and a Google employee at least half-time.

      That would probably make him an Adjunct Professor, ie. one who is not always given a course to teach and usually has an outside job, or a day job if you will.

      In any case, here is a more comprehensive list of possible professorships - actually quite an interesting read.

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      I have left slashdot and am now on Soylent News. FUCK YOU DICE.
    6. Re:I'm curious, by vlm · · Score: 2

      There are plenty of business education companies that charge thousands of dollars to teach you about any number of proprietary software packages for a few days to a week. You can even get Certified(TM).

      I was thinking more along the lines of "buy more than $25 million of our new DEXCS / firewall / router and receive a week of free training for everyone in your engineering department". For some reason the city name Romeoville IL which was for all intents and purposes "suburban Chicago" rings a bell.

      In "the good ole days" this was pretty standard. I sat in many a "free" class from Tellabs, Fortinet, DSC, a couple others. Fortinet had a bar in their training room and after class they'd serve you a drink and release the hounds err I mean salespeople. The DSC people came on site which kind of sucked because you didn't get to travel and coworkers would pull you out of class, after all, "you're at work, not away at training". Tellabs had this strange restaurant nearby which mostly served antelope, or was it buffalo, but it wasn't fine dining it was just regular sit down family dining, and I'd never seen an antelope themed restaurant before.

      They had no interest what so ever in teaching you basic OSI model or the SDH or TCP window mechanisms, but they would spend all week teaching you the crazy details of their proprietary software.

      Sometimes I wonder if the proprietary vendors whining about piracy would make more money if they gave away their software and went full on training and certifying mode. I'm fairly certain the total dollar value of CAD education nationwide exceeds the revenue of CAD vendors nationwide....

      --
      "Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
  3. Re:Khan by AchilleTalon · · Score: 4, Informative

    Of course he did, he teamed with Khan and relied on him for some parts of the AI course teaching prerequisite maths and probabilistic theory.

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    Achille Talon
    Hop!
  4. That was unexpected by Animats · · Score: 4, Interesting

    That was unexpected. But then, his automatic driving work had already moved to Google.

    He turned around the Stanford CS department, which was embarrassingly bad for years. (I have a degree from there; I know.) It was being run by the mathematical logic people, who were trying to make AI work through predicate calculus and expert systems. That turned out to be a dead end, but the existing faculty didn't want to admit it. Thrun reoriented the department towards statistical methods for AI, and things got moving again.

    1. Re:That was unexpected by flabbergast · · Score: 3, Informative

      Wasn't this every CS department though in the 80's and the 90's? AI in that time was all about expert systems and predicate calculus.

    2. Re:That was unexpected by Animats · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Actually, I got a MS from Stanford. The problem was the expert system guys, Feigenbaum and company. They were claiming that expert systems would yield strong AI Real Soon Now. Feigenbaum's 1983 book "The Fifth Generation" shows that optimism at its height. It did not end well. The next decade is referred to as the "AI Winter".

  5. This is the future. by GoodNewsJimDotCom · · Score: 4, Interesting

    When lectures can be saved to a video format on the Internet, why pay the teacher to deliver the same lecture every year?

    When books can be copied for free, why pay 200$ for a physical version of the book?

    I think the only thing we'll have in terms of live people will be live tutors you can ask questions via advanced IM

    The cool thing about this is that it is the opposite of the "No child gets ahead act", if a kid is motivated, they can watch hundreds of supplemental optional videos related to their course. Or with proper understanding of the subject at hand, they can move ahead to the new videos. Also this is all available for free or nearly free, so the cost of an education is simply 100$ or less for a laptop. This means people across the world who couldn't have access to quality education will. If you're in a 3rd world country with nothing to do all day, maybe you'll devote your life to getting a grand education. We might find new Einsteins popping up and at younger and younger ages.

    --
    God spoke to me
    1. Re:This is the future. by blueg3 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      When lectures can be saved to a video format on the Internet, why pay the teacher to deliver the same lecture every year?

      If a video of a lecture is as useful as the live lecture, it's a bad lecture.

      When books can be copied for free, why pay 200$ for a physical version of the book?

      If all of the distributed copies are free, I'm thinking the major problem is going to be finding people to write and edit them. Don't get me wrong, there are some older math texts you could probably use for ages, but that will only get you so far.

    2. Re:This is the future. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      When lectures can be saved to a video format on the Internet, why pay the teacher to deliver the same lecture every year?

      If a video of a lecture is as useful as the live lecture, it's a bad lecture.

      If seeing the lecture online is only as good as seeing it live, then it is a bad web site. Online, you can put additional content, have links that go to the exact point in the video where a question is answered, break up the video into topics so that students can spend more time on topics that are most relevant to them. You can also have more interactive tools and such.

    3. Re:This is the future. by tibit · · Score: 5, Insightful

      If a video of a lecture is as useful as the live lecture, it's a bad lecture.

      I'd be careful with that statement. If you claim there must be some interaction, then let's get real: you don't want to be interrupted by questions every 15 seconds. So live questioning as a feedback from students to the lecturer is out. Then the most interaction you'll get is the lecturer looking at faces and body language of students.

      But what does that tell the lecturer? Nothing that's very applicable when the medium is video!! In a video lecture, if you feel like falling asleep, you pause it, get up, walk around, come back refreshed, start watching again a few minutes back into the recording to get back on topic. If you need to look something up, you can pause, google for it, look in a book, look in previous lectures, then resume when you're ready. Those two situations cover most of the realtime feedback a lecturer would use, I'd presume. So, failing to show particular examples of how the reverse channel helps in a prerecorded lecture, I call your claim an gross exaggeration at best. Audience feedback is important in a live lecture setting, recorded lectures are really quite different because the student controls the playback. Good luck pausing the professor when you feel like dozing off for 45 minutes in the auditorium :)

      --
      A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
    4. Re:This is the future. by jholyhead · · Score: 2

      I actually think that the way the lecture videos were presented in the AI Class were superior to most conventional lectures. They were broken up in bitesize chunks of 2-10 minutes each, which meant that as soon as you started to lose focus, you just walk away, whether that be after 15 minutes or 2 hours. Also, if you found a topic confusing you could stop moving forward, read up on the topic yourself or consult your fellow students on the discussion boards (which were incredible) until you were happy with it, then continue on. And of course, you can watch them repeatedly.

      Sure, there are shortcomings, but I think they more than held their own.

    5. Re:This is the future. by Cruciform · · Score: 2

      A lecturer can also do what a comic does and spend a considerable amount of time fine-tuning their presentation on live audiences before recording the final event for the class. Once you've got a solid feel for what works you can bang it out.
      And if you need to you can edit together footage from a couple of different events to get the Director's Cut.

    6. Re:This is the future. by real-modo · · Score: 2

      The point is: Do we really need that many teachers around the world? Wouldn't be much more productive to have them working on their respective fields and do either research or at least development and innovation.

      The saying goes, "the best way to learn something is to teach it."

      There's a famous anecdote by Richard Feynman about himself. He was working on some knotty area of quantum physics with colleagues. After some time, the group felt it had a good understanding of the topic and could move on. Feynman said, "OK, just let me write it up as a freshman lecture to test our understanding." A week later he went back and said, "You know, I couldn't do it. I couldn't write that lecture. We need to study this some more."

      So, no to the second question. If we want good solid research done, we need our researchers to be teachers.

      At grade school level, what's needed is individual tuition by tutors smart enough to adapt their methods to each student. Expert systems hold out the promise of that, but we're a couple of decades away at least. Meanwhile, the world needs more teachers. Yes to the first question.

  6. Going back to the original universities. by trout007 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    In the first universities anyone could stop in and listen to a lecturer for free. If they were interested in perusing individual education they would work out a fee between the professor and the student. There wasn't any strict curriculum or degrees. The professors paid the university a cut similar to the way a barber shop works today.

    The business model should be the same. Free to watch the lectures and pay for individual attention.

    --
    I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
    1. Re:Going back to the original universities. by nessus42 · · Score: 2

      Just because people get away with it doesn't mean they're supposed to do it.

      Who cares about "supposed to"? I'm talking the actual reality of the matter.

      It's true though that if too many people started doing this, they might stop allowing it. I doubt that this is much of a risk, however. You'd have to live near the campus and have enough free time during the day to do this, so there are not going to be teaming masses.

      |>ouglas

  7. 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.

  8. Re:Khan by Forbman · · Score: 3, Funny

    "Khan, you bloodsucker! You're going to have to do your own dirty work now! Do you hear me? Do you?"

  9. Re:Business model? by Cruciform · · Score: 3, Insightful

    If they do as mentioned above and use the class as a way to drum up interest from companies that want to recruit the best students then it can pay for itself via finders fees. That would be a great way to subsidize education.

  10. It's a good start by Colin+Smith · · Score: 2

    Start with the basics (beat Google) and build up over time to something really difficult.

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    Deleted
  11. Re:Khan by engun · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I find it interesting though, that Sebastian Thrun gets so much attention, and Andrew Ng for example, gets no mention. I think that Ng poured in a tremendous amount of effort to teach an absolutely outstanding class with far more structured and well-developed content.

    Don't get me wrong, Thrun is an enthusiastic and obviously knowledgeable individual, but having followed both AI and ML classes, I was of the opinion that Andrew Ng was the better teacher. Thrun needs to improve his teaching skills, so that he can impart his great store of knowledge better to students. Although that is my personal opinion, I think you might find that it is backed by some evidence, if you were to trawl through the comments on the respective forums of the AI and ML classes. Overall, both of them + Peter Norvig and the rest of their teams, made fantastic contributions, and that should be recognized equally, whenever possible!

  12. This is NOT the future. by real-modo · · Score: 2

    The modern lecture format originated in medieval Northern Italy, and hasn't changed significantly. The rationale for the lecture as a method of transmitting knowledge and skill was that books were extremely costly, due to the cost of scribes.

    Since Gutenberg the rationale for lectures has disappeared.

    Rather than moronically scaling up lectures in a TV-like way, we need some R&D done on better methods of teaching. This has finally been realised and academics are - with great trepidation - starting to measure themselves and experiment with different methods. I expect that this century will see the death of the lecture.

  13. Offering a CS degree soon? Eng degrees too? by RandCraw · · Score: 2

    I doubt Thrun intends to offer a few courses and stop there. I think he'll offer an entire CS curriculum within maybe 3 years, and offer some soft of CS degree program soon thereafter.

    It seems like you could offer other degrees using this same technology -- probably all engineerings, physics, probably math and statistics, maybe biology (but without labs).

    Not only would the degrees be FREE (a huge thing for the poor in the third world and BRIC countries), but they'd be FAST. By excluding all the non-essentials, the equivalent of a BS in CS could be completed three times faster, in no more than 1.5 years.

    Based on what I've seen from Thrun so far, I bet the degree will be widely respected, and frankly, better than 3/4 of today's CS degrees.

    Universities beware. You're about to run smack into The Innovator''s Dilemma. And in my humble opinion, it's about damned time.