Live Chat!

Hey everybody. We’re honored to have Sebastian Thrun with us. He’s the founder of Udacity, which is a pioneering online education company. Before Udacity, Sebastian was a tenured Stanford professor specializing in artificial intelligence. He’s one of the foremost experts in that field--he led the team that won the Defense Department’s self-driving car competition. Along the way, he joined Google where he founded Google X and helped create Google Street View, Google Glass, and of course the Google Self Driving Car. He’s here to talk to us today about education.

Sebastian, thanks so much for being here.

Thank you :)

To me, making education accessible to everyone is EXTREMELY exciting. I also believe the world needs new approaches and new solutions, to change the access equation in higher education. This is a great challenge for me, and I enjoy it tremendously.

According to McKinsey, 58% of employers report that graduates are not adequately prepared for work. By 2020, they estimate, there will be a shortfall of 85 million jobs in the high and middle-skilled work level globally. And this is just some of the data here. Think lifelong learning, and how our skills are shifting over a lifetime.

We are still in the early days. Obviously, online education has been around for a long time, and has really changed the lives of millions of people. But there is still a lot to learn. I am excited to see so much experimentation right now. At Udacity, we have learned that our students succeed at much higher ratios when we add people into the mix - in the form of mentors and coaches.

Bill Gates, at the World Economic Forum, took me aside and pointed out to me that the students finishing out MOOCs were those who were extremely self-motivated. There is nothing bad about this, but I aspire to have Udacity be a good productive learning environment, not just for the most self-motivated people. I really don't want to rest until every learner makes it all the way to the end of a class. This is why I care so much about completion rates.

Please do enroll in our new data track! Some of the most exciting companies in Silicon Valley have worked with Udacity to make these classes happen: Cloudera, Facebook, MongoDB, and others. And these are just the beginning - we have more rolling out in January. The companies believe this is the stuff to know to be productive in the global workplace - so don't just take our word for it :) The Facebook class, for example, contains the same material that incoming Facebook engineers have to master. But big data is relevant to nearly all companies. It is revolutionizing entire fields, like medicine, where big data is changing the way we design and deliver treatment. Of Government. Or banking. The list is LONG.

Just to pick up on that for a sec: Don't you think though that degrees still matter. Isn't Facebook always going to prefer someone with a BS from say Stanford than a certificate from
Udacity?

Here's a follow up question from a reader

A BS degree is NOT in the works at Udacity. Having taught many Bacherlor students myself, I think there is a level of critical thinking skill and character development that would be hard to achieve for us. We really focus much more on the skills needed on the job. You can learn with us how to code in HTML5, or how to understand and work with big data. Most of our Udacity students already have a BS degree.

I love teachers! I am a teacher myself. I just spent the morning at Stanford with my own students in my research lab. Brian, you make great points. At Udacity, we started out with computerized MOOCs, but they didn't keep most students engaged. We experimented a lot with peer interaction, mentoring, and customized content, and are now offering a much improved experience. It's still important to remember, though, that these are still the early days. We are learning a lot, and we are improving our classes by the day.

Some of the biggest skills that employers ask us about are of course Big Data, but also general front end engineering, mobile, and cyber security. With various tech companies in Silicon Valley (like Salesforce, Intuit, Cloudera, Google, etc) we are now building up these classes. I have to admit this has been a lot of fun to me. The companies in the Valley are really eager to help. This is a time where industry wants to play an active role in education - and we are giving them the opportunity.

It is. Every single employer I talk to brings up Cyber Security as one of their most important hiring needs. The problem here is that cyber security is so new, most colleges don't even teach it yet. And it's even worse for people in mid-career, who finished college a while back. Udacity is working quite actively to make classes in this area available, some time in early 2014. We see a really big opportunity here to reduce the worldwide skills gap in this important new area.

The universities I have worked at (and with) do listen to what industry needs. Georgia Tech, for example, listened to AT&T and many other companies by making its own education available online. And as a result,they received record applications for their new online Computer Science Master's program (over 2,300, 85% from within the US). But at the same time, I feel that corporations like Cloudera are perhaps in a better position to offer the latest in skills education. This is a bit different from degree programs, in that it is more focused on skills. Being in the center of Silicon Valley certainly helps us at Udacity to make classes that are at the bleeding edge.

HoHa's question has been posed by a lot of people--and I think it's really valid. Traditional liberal arts education has focused on teaching people how to think as opposed to teaching specific skills. Where will do think that will happen in the future?

I don't think that virtual reality technology is central to what we are trying to achieve at Udacity, but I would love to see a fully immersive learning experience using perhaps the Oculus Rift or similar technologies. How much fun would it be to learn history at the places where the American Revolution or the Storming of the Bastille actually took place. As we dive deeper into using technology in education, these things should all be possible. And f-u-n !

Personalized education. At Udacity, you can already proceed at your own pace. You can do your favorite exercises over and over again, and effortlessly skip over stuff that you don't care about. And learning has become much more active and student-centric, with the computer patiently waiting for your answer. But this is just the beginning. The next big step will be personalized learning paths. Our mentors already work with individual learners to supplement materials and exercises that meet their needs. With computers, we can automate the composition of learning materials, and tailor them to the needs of individual learners. This will be the biggest revolution. And like Udacity, many companies in the e-learning space are already doing this. No more sitting through boring classes :)

Thank you big time for conducting this Q&A, Max. It's been a real pleasure talking to you, and I am excited about the work you do. And thanks for great questions from the audience. If you are out there... feel free to follow us on Twitter or Facebook. We always love feedback from our students, so send me emails with thoughts, questions, or the occasional compliment :). Wishing you all a happy holiday season!

Thanks for joining us, everyone -- if you haven't yet, be sure to read Max's feature on Udacity and Sebastian Thrun in this month's issue of Fast Company!