The $100 Masters Degree From Udacity

mikejuk writes "In an interview with Udacity founder Sebastian Thrun, it was revealed that he hopes to offer a Masters degree for only $100, and is close to offering a full computer science degree. 'There are unfortunately some rough edges between our fundamental class CS101 and the next class up, when this is done I believe we can get an entire computer science education completely online and free and I think this is the first time this has happened in the history of humanity.' The latest course from Udacity is on statistics, and he is hoping to top the 160,000 sign up for his first online class on AI. It is also hoped to be the first class where students can visit a testing center to get their achievments formally certified."

Comments

Future of Education

[mfh]

This here is the future of education. Eventually we'll formalize this further by enabling a quick download directly to our brains that brings everyone up to speed fast regarding the facts of science, discipline, critical thinking, analysis.

What education will never be able to teach us is morality. Bertrand Russel, the great philosopher once was asked what he would offer the future generations.

Here is what he had to say about it. He said two things, one intellectual and one moral; when you study any matter, ask yourself only what are the facts, and what is the truth that the facts bear out; the moral thing is love is wise, hatred is foolish.

With education like the $100 masters degree, we have the first part down fine. The rest of our development needs to focus on the second.

Re:Future of Education

[Cryacin]

it will eventually become accessible to only the upper class (as education always is).

A famous man once said, give a man a fish, he eats today and owes you a fish forever. But teach a man to fish, and he'll be competing with you for fish tomorrow.

Re:Future of Education

[Auroch]

it will eventually become accessible to only the upper class (as education always is).

A famous man once said, give a man a fish, he eats today and owes you a fish forever. But teach a man to fish, and he'll be competing with you for fish tomorrow.

Another famous man (pratchett) said - Make a man a fire, you keep him warm for a day. Set a man on fire and you keep him warm for the rest of his life.

Re:Future of Education

[WaywardGeek]

I'm almost done with Udacity's free on-line robotic car course. It's fascinating, probably more for the new ideas in teaching than the actual course, though the course is pretty good. I don't know where this is heading, but the impact on the world of having 160,000 people take the online course has to outweigh the impact of teaching a lecture once a semester at Stanford.

The old system works, and offers opportunity for personal growth that's so far simply not available on line. I learned more from my peers in Berkeley undergrad engineering than from actual course work. I see no good online substitute for having a group of super-geek peers who love to hack stuff, build stuff, and pull off audacious stunts. Communicating by e-mail is just not the same as an all nighter group session of mathematical noodling on an unsolved problem.

So, somewhere there will be a new balance, where we take advantage of this super affordable access to learning, while somehow giving our young people a college experience. I don't know where it's heading, but it will be exciting to watch.

Re:Future of Education

[hey!]

Maybe, maybe not.

The idea of a $100 master's degree is subversive, especially considering that a master's is the basic qualification to hold a professorship at a modern university. It attacks the one of the main roles that academic degrees have assumed in our society: being a certification of social class. If there's any doubt of that consider this: recent studies have shown that the average amount of time college students spend studying has dropped from 24 hours/week to 15. Some have put the current figure as low as 10-13 hours/week spent outside of class. Even engineering students spend a mere nineteen hours per week outside of class; today's *nerds* spend five fewer hours per week studying than the average student in their grandparent's generation.

This lack of rigor is reflected in how degrees are used after graduation. Most jobs that require a nonspecific bachelor's degree (i.e. not in an area like engineering) could be done by an intelligent and well-read high school graduate. Many jobs that require master's degrees could be done by a bachelor's degree holder in that field. It is difficult (although obviously not impossible) for someone who has to work to put bread on the table to obtain those kinds of credentials. So a bachelor's degree reflects having middle class parents more than it does intelligence, knowledge, or intellectual sophistication.

Now if you can get the actual education for $100, then there'd be no justification to withhold accreditation from a program like this. That would mean that *anybody* could get degrees to use as a credential provided they can do the work. That would completely undermine the higher education system in the country as it now stands. It might spell the end of widespread college education.

Re:Future of Education

[Sir_Sri]

Ya, this is more an exercise in wondering how large classroom sizes could be, if you could seat 160k people in a room, and how much interaction you need with a human being on the other end.

Lots of professors would be quite happy to focus on research full time and not have to teach. Pick out the good teachers, the good textbooks, and just play a video of their lectures in a classroom for people who want to show up and interact with other students. The problem with that plan is that you don't then build personal relationships with professors or grad students or other students. Most of us who have done some sort of technical degree can point to an instance or two of a concept we just didn't get in lecture or from the book, and it took a TA or other students to explain it to us... eventually.

Research still needs to happen with or without the teaching component of universities. But the huge mentoring relationship that happens there, and the social connections, those are a major portion of the experience. How do you know if you want to be a researcher if you don't meet other researchers? A 100 dollar online course is about the same thing as a 100 dollar textbook just more interactive. Did you buy the book? Did you read the book? Or in the new media, did you watch the lecture? It's useful as a reference, it's probably not even bad to teach yourself. But it's not the same as going to university. In the real world you have to teach yourself a lot, whether thats from books or the web or whatever. So in that sense udacity probably will find a significant market in replacing textbooks with at least partially interactive web enabled experiences, for about the same price. It might also enable smaller schools to make available more esoteric topics they don't have expertise in, which is good.

Re:Future of Education

[RabidReindeer]

A famous man once said, give a man a fish, he eats today and owes you a fish forever. But teach a man to fish, and he'll be competing with you for fish tomorrow.

Actually, what the proponent of this adage really meant was "teach a man to fish, then for the rest of his life he'll have to pay through the nose to rent tackle, boat and launch privileges from you because you own the only bait shop and dock because the only body of water around is your private lake, you bastard!

Re:Good and bad

[contrapunctus]

It's really really unfortunate that you used MBA as an example.

Key Word "Hope"

[kenh]

It isn't news that someone "hopes" to do something, and the gap between offering a complete Computer Science Masters Degree and working out the "rough edges between our fundamental class CS101 and the next class up" state they are in now is quite immense.

Decoded: They are having a problem coming up with a second semester CS class.

This works out to about $10/class I figure, maybe less - I fully suspect the degree they will offer is worth every penny, but not a penny more - and you won't "fool" anyone with this Masters degree, this is on the same level as the mail-order priest ordinations that were once offered in the back of magazines like Rolling Stone.

Re:Key Word "Hope"

[mdf356]

I fully suspect the degree they will offer is worth every penny, but not a penny more - and you won't "fool" anyone with this Masters degree

I, as a interviewer, won't be "fooled". But since I work with some brilliant software people who never got a college degree, it won't necessarily be a barrier to getting at least a phone interview. If the interviewee knows their stuff, it doesn't matter how they learned it.

I mean, with someone who has 20 years experience, do you care if they went to Harvard, Stanford, or the University of Kansas? Of course not, you care if they're smart and have some relevant skills. A lot of times as an interviewer I don't even care if they have the relevant skills (i.e. I work in the storage industry, but candidates don't need to know anything about storage or filesystems to get a job here -- I certainly didn't know that when I started).

As an interviewer I care about two things, essentially: can you think, and do you understand some CS theory? If you can do the first but don't know the second, you can still get a job, we just won't start you as a senior level engineer.

"In the history of humanity"

[Kijori]

Is it really necessary to explain that this is the first time anyone has offered a CS degree online in the history of humanity?

We're talking about a course about computing offered entirely over the internet. Surely if it hasn't been done recently we can be pretty sure that the Ancient Greeks didn't beat us to it?

Re:Mass Produced education.

[kenh]

"However I think a hybrid approach would be a good match. There are some classes, that I didn't like spending thousands of dollars on, just because I had to take them, I would much rather pay a lower rate, and take the mediocre online class to get the credit, and save some money. But save the classes I am actually interested in with live people and professors."

With absolutely no offense intended, what you want makes perfect sense, but it is more of a technical certification than a college degree.

A college degree is an indication that the student is well-rounded, has a breadth of knowledge and not just depth of knowledge in a particular area, as with a technical certification. There is nothing wrong with a technical certification (think "Master Plumber or Electrician", not MSCE).

The classes you dismiss (classes you "had to take") don't have to be of interest to you, but are the differentiator between a college degree and a technical certification. If someone presents themselves to me as a graduate of, say, Harvard, with a CS degree, I expect them to know more that computer science topics - I expect them to be fairly well-rounded. But that (apparently) isn't what you want, nor is it likely what your potential employers are looking for particularly, but the college degree is the only game in town to denote a certain level of education on a subject.

Re:education needs to be smaller chunks / apprenti

[rolfwind]

In reality, we have given colleges simply too much power by indoctrinating everyone about the wonders of education and always equating it as going to college. If you think about it, training people has shifted from the burden of a company to the burden and cost of the individual for, imo, no greater gain. Wages and the like have been stagnant or worse since the 1970s. But it's not all roses for the company either, often they have to train the workers anyway after college.

So much of school is just theory when most people simply learn by doing. It's like trying to learning to cook by reading a book and then doing a dish or two at the end of every semester. Just not going to work if you want to be a line cook at a good restaurant.

Course material is not an education

[__aaltlg1547]

An education is more than that. It's sitting through hours of lectures where students ask questions and topics are discussed at length, not only with the professor but with other students outside of class. It's submitting work and having it critiqued by an expert. It's discussing why your answers were wrong or incomplete. It's discussing why you have answers your professor never thought of but are still correct or more correct than what he was expecting. It's deciding what out-of-major classes are of interest to you or would further your education in your chosen field. It's telling your not-in-major friends about insights you learned from your classes that are applicable to everybody and listening to the same thing from them. Most of these things simply can't be automated and many of them can't be done as well on line. None of them can be done for $100 a degree.

None of that can be force-fed to you one-way down a wire. Education is interactive.

Real education can be had over the internet, but it's NOT the same and not as valuable as learning in-person, and it will never be cheap (unless somebody else is paying for it) and it will always take as long or nearly as long as the traditional route. It just takes that long to have that experience and absorb and digest that much information.

Snore

[Sperbels]

Computer Science? Snooze. I already do that. I want an online degree program in physics, or geology, or something. I want to study the interesting stuff that I didn't do in school because I sold out and went the path that would make me shitloads of money instead of shitloads on happiness and intellectual fulfillment.

Re:Mass Produced education.

[Anonymous Coward]

It may be U.S. only (I hope so!) Others can talk all they want about "well-rounded" but the economic reality is that English, History, etc., courses do not produce graduates who earn more money. And so the only way those departments survive, since they can't on their own merits, is by forcing all students, some of whom *will* increase their earning potential, to take them.

It's pure economics -- there's a bunch of economically useless professors, who have plenty of time to petition the President of the school or the state legislature about why their brand of "well-rounded" is so useful, and thereby gain a fraction of a lot of student's tuition, instead of the very small piece they'd otherwise have.

Now ask yourself this: is college the only time in my life I am able to read classical literature or study art history or any of these other things that somehow make one well-rounded? Of course not. So the idea that one needs to study this in college is ludicrous, except to those departments that don't produce economic value trying to justify their existence.

I work for an engineering firm. We don't hire writers to write our reports. The engineers and scientists are expected to know how to do that in addition to their primary focus of study. It would be wonderful if clients would accept our projects with no report, but for some crazy reason they like documentation.

Literature and grammar classes are useful in the STEM fields. Peers and clients both expect well-written reports/papers, and they can tell when someone didn't pay attention to those classes in school.

Oh, and for history classes not being useful, you'd get laughed at for not knowing of major historical facts in mainstream society if conversing to someone with a bit of intellect.

Philosophy teaches you how to think logically using words. Life isn't all logic gates and mathematical proofs.

Sociology provides insights into how the group or herd thinks. There can be a huge mutual benefit from knowing that as it can help you convey your thoughts and knowledge more effectively.

I am a scientist who graduated from a liberal arts curriculum, and I'm very glad to have the additional basic courses in non-math/science fields to help me better converse with all people in my society as it opens doors that otherwise would be unavailable to me. There's tremendous value in it, and I've seen it benefit my fellow alumni as well.