Sebastian Thrun Pivots Udacity Toward Vocational Education

lpress writes "Udacity CEO and MOOC super star Sebastian Thrun has decided to scale back his original ambition of providing a free college education for everyone and focus on (lifelong) vocational education. A pilot test of Udacity material in for-credit courses at San Jose State University was discouraging, so Udacity is developing an AT&T-sponsored masters degree at Georgia Tech and training material for developers. If employers like this emphasis, it might be a bigger threat to the academic status quo than offering traditional college courses."

Comments

Re:Accreditation?

[qbzzt]

The certificates may be worthless. I don't know, I never tried to use them. But the skills they teach (Python programming, using AppEngine, etc.) are valuable. At least, in my corner of the real world they proved themselves so (this application uses AppEngine in Python).

Thus vocational

[SuperKendall]

Without the seal of approval from a college accreditation agency, this is worthless in the real world.

One might say that with the seal of approval from a college accreditation agency, most college degrees are worthless in the real world...

Which is why they have turned to a vocational angle, where you learn something useful instead of getting a "degree".

Re:Thus vocational

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

That doesn't really solve the problem in a substantial portion of cases. Unless a skill is strikingly visible in short order, or you have a prior in of some kind, people like 'degrees' because they serve a convenient signalling function in situations where full verification imposes excessive costs.

If you just want to do some DIY, or polish some specific skill for a job you already have, you don't need signalling; if you want people to hire you (or even get as far as bothering to test you in person), signalling has its uses.

Re: Thus vocational

[sumdumass]

I think there is a shortage in value. What you are seeing is an abundance of people without the abilities to provide enough value or the same types of value competing for the same jobs.

Training can fix this and when trained employees earn more, they spend more, but business grows, new businesses find a spot and it moves up from there. This of it more like a stimulus package from the government.

I think that's a wasted opportunity

[Dr. Spork]

I looked through the links now and I'm getting this subtext that Thun is sick of dealing with the bullshit that comes from trying to work within the framework of established universities and their entrenched faculties. The idea of moving into vocational education and forgetting the whole "get college credit" model really might be more dangerous to the educational establishment, and Thun really does seem to be hoping for their demise. (I'm guessing he sat through some rather ugly meetings with department heads and university administrators.) But I'm disappointed by this. If the way that university education dies is by vocational courses cutting off their air (=money) supply, something of great value will be lost, something that could have been transitioned without too much violence into a MOOC-style model. Because let's face it, vocational courses can help you in your job, but they don't exactly fill you with wonder and culture and insight, the way that well-crafted university courses can. Well, probably, "proper" college courses are bound to become MOOCs anyway, even if Thun won't be the one to do it. And if this is done right, the wonder, culture and insight that these courses can bestow will reach far more people than they reach now. But I don't think that there is any guarantee that this will be done right. It can also turn out canned, contrived, shallow, proprietary and generic. Insofar as I thought that Thun was trying to do it right, I consider this a victory for the bastards.

Re:I think that's a wasted opportunity

[Trepidity]

If you find more wonder in the Discovery Channel than a good theoretical CS or physics class, you might have a superficial idea of wonder. :)

Re:I think that's a wasted opportunity

[artor3]

I looked through the links now and I'm getting this subtext that Thun is sick of dealing with the bullshit that comes from trying to work within the framework of established universities and their entrenched faculties

That's not what the article says at all. The schools did a pilot program, and of the students taking the course on Udacity, only 50% passed, compared to ~75% of the classroom students.

I'd love for Udacity to succeed too, but you've got to accept reality. As of right now, Udacity isn't as effective as a traditional classroom. Now, it's not useless -- 50% passing is still a lot of people getting an education.

Perhaps this just comes down to people learning in different ways: for some people, face-to-face interaction with teacher and classmates is essential to their progress. For others, they learn best from individual study. The second group can excel with MOOCs. But traditional classrooms will remain for the first group. Both groups end up winning -- the second because they have cheap and easy access to education, and the first because the reduced demand for classroom seats will drive down prices.

Re:I think that's a wasted opportunity

[sumdumass]

I have found that most people I know find their desire to learn or an interest in studying until well after they were supposed to. For what it is worth, the younger people who are interested in learning rather than going through the motions in order to complete some goal are to be commended. But the reality might be a lot of people do not appreciate or understand the value of learning until it does become a matter of the Discovery Channel being the lecturer.

That may be why there is a propensity to build luxury four year resorts with fancy dorms and gyms at the universities. It may be the marketing that keeps students around.

Re: I think that's a wasted opportunity

[ebno-10db]

There's a human need for attention and face-to-face interaction that MOOCs don't fill.

In grade school? I completely agree. Somewhat in HS. After that, if you can't learn largely on your own, especially with online and other material available (and fellow students if you want) you shouldn't be in university. People shouldn't expect to be spoon fed the rest of their lives.

Re:I think that's a wasted opportunity

[qbzzt]

I think (I was never in one) that the first tier universities allow even undergrads to interact with the world experts and do research under their direction (see http://web.mit.edu/urop/). This is a non-scalable function, which MOOCs can't do.

This is the reason MITx is such a good idea for MIT - it doesn't eat into their customer base, but that of lesser universities.

Re:I think that's a wasted opportunity

[achileas]

I agree wholeheartedly, but with widespread cutbacks and the like causing even public flagship universities to act more like the 'University' of Phoenix (okay, slight hyperbole), universities (and their state government patrons) are doing a well-enough job of killing the university model -- and that is a bad thing. You'll hear the same from many disgruntled faculty who are being heavily pressured to put their courses fully online, typically by recording lecturettes and writing summaries to hold students' hands through the material. And don't get me started on online quizzes/exams and the rampant (and obvious) cheating. These classes force one professor and 1-2 TAs to deal with 300+ students for classes that normally have one professor, one TA, and 30-70 students. The larger traditional courses (i.e. not online) typically have 5-10+ TAs covering 250 students (who don't have to come to the TAs for technical problems like they do with online courses) and are for introductory courses, while entire departments (including smaller, more focused courses) are being forced to go all online to reduce costs. This is something I've witnessed firsthand and have been on both sides of it - both as an undergraduate student and as a graduate TA that helped migrate courses to the online platform our university is using. It's crap.

Re: I think that's a wasted opportunity

[achileas]

There is still a great need for smaller, more focused classes at the university level. From your comment, it seems you haven't had the pleasure of one of these, because you are certainly expected to learn on your own. The face-to-face interaction and being around other people helps you learn different skills (presenting research is an important one in the sciences), and having a smaller (6-10 students) class allows for greater depth and discussion to be achieved. If you're still in college, I highly recommend taking some classes. And in graduate school, nearly all of your classes will be like this. So no, it's not a necessity just for grade school (unless you want to make the case that graduate students are bumbling morons and akin to 3rd graders, and I'm sure there are some faculty who would agree).

MS the new VoTech

[Anonymous Coward]

The BS is the new high school degree. So now the MS is the new VoTech? Sheesh, people are getting stupid. I actually took electronics VoTech the last two years of high school in the late 80's, and we covered Karnaugh mapping, small signal response, assembly level programming, etc.

Thanks for giving up on poor students

[Jonah Hex]

and shifting your efforts towards people who can complete courses, those who can do well in traditional college courses.

What’s got the academic Internet’s frayed mom jeans in a bunch, however, is that Thrun’s alleged mea culpa is actually a you-a culpa. For Udacity’s catastrophic failure to teach remedial mathematics at San Jose State University, Thrun blames neither the corporatization of the university nor the MOOC’s use of unqualified “student mentors” in assessment. Instead, he blames the students themselves for being so damn poor.

The way Fast Company has it, Thrun chucks those San Jose State students under the self-driving Google car faster than he chugs up a hill on his custom-made road bike, leaving a panting Max Chafkin in the dust to ponder the following Thrunism: “These were students from difficult neighborhoods, without good access to computers, and with all kinds of challenges in their lives. It's a group for which this medium is not a good fit.”

Apparently students fail MOOCs because those students have the gall to be poor.

The problem, of course, is that those students represent the precise group MOOCs are meant to serve. “MOOCs were supposed to be the device that would bring higher education to the masses,” Jonathan Rees noted. “However, the masses at San Jose State don’t appear to be ready for the commodified, impersonal higher education that MOOCs offer.” Thrun’s cavalier disregard for the SJSU students reveals his true vision of the target audience for MOOCs: students from the posh suburbs, with 10 tablets apiece and no challenges whatsoever—that is, the exact people who already have access to expensive higher education.

Re:Thanks for giving up on poor students

[qbzzt]

Udacity is doing a good job (based on my, admittedly limited, experience) providing extra training for mid-career professionals. That is a bigger market, for most industries, than college-age students who want to get into the industry.

Re:Thanks for giving up on poor students

[SolemnLord]

Because a startup is obligated to serve those who need help that it cannot provide, rather than those who make the best use of its technology?

When you make promises about radically upending education for everyone, it turns out you have to actually include everyone.

International Correspondence Schools 2.0

[Animats]

Vocational education by correspondence has a long history. There was a big boom in it a century ago. Popular Mechanics, for 1920: "Learn the automobile trade at home - spare times" - Dyke's Correspondence School of Motoring.

International Correspondence Schools was established in 1890, and they're still in business. For decades, they had ads in Popular Mechanics, Popular Electronics, etc. By 1906 total enrollments reached 900,000. The dropout rates were high; only one in six made it past the first third of the material in a course. Only 2.6% of students who began a course finished it. Udacity had stats like that at times.

"The regular technical school or college aims to educate a man broadly; our aim, on the contrary, is to educate him only along some particular line." - Clarke, "The Correspondence School", 1906

"I'd aspired to give people a profound education--to teach them something substantial, but the data was at odds with this idea." ... "At the end of the day, the true value proposition of education is employment." - Thrun, 2013

Not much has changed.

Re:Don't get an education for work, get one for li

[qbzzt]

When you have close to zero assets and close to zero skills, you can't afford to pay tens of thousands of dollars for general education. General education is great, but being able to support the family you'll one day have is more important.

Universities could get away with general education when they were cheaper, and before that when they were elite institutions for people who would inherit a large business anyway.

LOL

[dcollins]

"If employers like this emphasis, it might be a bigger threat to the academic status quo than offering traditional college courses."

Please. Here is a list of technologies that did NOT result in the demise of college education:

- Books mass-produced on the printing press.
- Correspondence courses in the early 1900's, engaged by millions of hopeful learners at the time.
- Radio or television programming.
- Software-based learning from the 1960's onward.
- Online courses from the 1990's onward.
- MOOC in the 2010's onward.

I really don't understand the Slashdot mass delusion that this or any technology could mean the death of colleges in any short- to medium time frame.

Used to

[SuperKendall]

people like 'degrees' because they serve a convenient signaling function

No anymore they do not.

Or at least, they are not sending the signals they think they are sending.

Re:Used to

[mellyra]

Or at least, they are not sending the signals they think they are sending.

The signalling theory was introduced by Spence in his 1973 paper Job Market Signaling.

His basic idea is to view the employer as buying a lottery ticket when he hires an employee. He knows extremely little about the attributes of the potential employee that he is really interested in and thus has to draw inferences from easily observable attributes such as "education, previous work, race, sex, criminal and service records, and a host of other data".

Many of these attributes cannot be modified (e.g. race and sex) but those that can be modified and especially those where the cost of improving the attribute is low compared to its impact on the employer can be manipulated by the prospective employee to signal the employer about his qualities.

Spence primarily views education as a signal for work potential but he readily admits that it might, e.g. be rather used as a signal for status instead. However, the important point is that "signaling costs are negatively correlated with productivity" (or with whatever other property you want to signal your potential employer about).

Someone who has a high work potential will be more willing to get an education because getting an education will be cheaper for him than for other people - not just in terms of money (although you could argue that scholarships, a lower chance of not successfully completing the degree, ... can make it cheaper in terms of money) but also in terms of "psychic and other costs", e.g. time. Someone who already has a high social status will find it easier (i.e. cheaper) to get an ivy league education to signal this status to his employer than someone who intends to get that education solely to mislead employers about his true social status.

Although different signals can be appropriate for different types of work, the signalling value of getting an education is not about the content about that education. You aren't primarily demonstrating that you learned any useful skills. In fact the signaling value of an otherwise completely useless education might be even higher than that of an education that has a very reliable return in terms of real-world applicable skills, e.g. most mathematicians are not hired because they need theoretical math skills for their job but because mathematics has a reputation for being insanely hard. For the vast majority of people it doesn't make sense to study mathematics because the cost would be far too high and the rl skills learned are low. The same goes for almost any PhD degree - the knowledge learned while earning the degree is way too specialized to be of any use to your employer - but the fact that the cost of getting a PhD was so low to you (because you are so awesome) that you felt it economically worthwhile to get one anyways is a strong signal to any prospective employer.

That's the way those who think that signals are important (there are other theories that explain the value of education in terms of accumulation of human capital) think that signals do work. And correspondingly these are the signals they think they are sending by getting an education. Now, how do you disagree?

Re:Used to

[SuperKendall]

Someone who has a high work potential will be more willing to get an education because getting an education will be cheaper for him than for other people

No, it will not. You have missed exactly the reason why college has lost any significance - because the cost of college is now equal to everyone, thanks to heavy subsidy - but also grown so expensive (thanks to the same subsidy for all) that the smarter players are not willing to saddle themselves with debt.

These days a far better signal is obtained through linked-in or a Google search than a college degree can provide. As the cost soars and the real world value falls, higher education is headed for a market reckoning.

Not at all true

[SuperKendall]

There is a fact a high demand for actually skilled labor. There's a high demand for skilled developers, for example; I have seen that first hand.

I also know from others there is high demand for really skilled heavy machinery workers, skilled plumbers, skilled electricians, etc.

What there is a lack of is people willing to put time and especially effort into learning a real skill rather than a degree. You can find guys willing to sling code or a hammer as just a job, but very few that can (or want to) operate at a higher level.

Re:Not at all true

[Anonymous Coward]

There is plenty of supply to fill those demands, at the right price. Demand for skilled labor without the willingness to pay for it doesn't count.