A Q&A With Udacity's Pioneering CEO Sebastian Thrun
Join the discussion with Fast Company writer Max Chafkin and Udacity's Sebastian Thrun on Tuesday, December 3rd at 3pm (ET). Thrun will be answering your questions--submit them now using the "Make a comment" box below!
Sebastian Thrun
In 2011, Sebastian Thrun ignited an education revolution when he offered to let anyone in the world take his Stanford University class on artificial intelligence for free. At the time Thrun was arguably the world's foremost expert in the field--his robotic car won the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge and he founded Google X, the secretive research lab responsible for Google's self driving car and Google Glass--and his class quickly attracted hundreds of thousands of students.
Thrun eventually left his job at Google to launch Udacity, an online education start-up that as of this fall had educated some 1.6 million students. Some think the company--and others like it--could ultimately replace traditional college education for many students, while helping to arrest skyrocketing tuition prices.
As reported in Fast Company's December/January feature story, Thrun has recently turned his attention to improving completion rates, a problem that has plagued companies that provide these so-called Massive Online Open Courses, or MOOCs, and partnering with large tech companies to offer courses in hot subjects like big data and mobile web development. He has also emerged as one of the most important voices in the debate about the future of education.
He'll be with us right here, starting at 3 p.m. (ET) on December 3rd. You can submit your questions ahead of time using the box below.
As reported in Fast Company's December/January feature story, Thrun has recently turned his attention to improving completion rates, a problem that has plagued companies that provide these so-called Massive Online Open Courses, or MOOCs, and partnering with large tech companies to offer courses in hot subjects like big data and mobile web development. He has also emerged as one of the most important voices in the debate about the future of education.
He'll be with us right here, starting at 3 p.m. (ET) on December 3rd. You can submit your questions ahead of time using the box below.
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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. -
Hi, Great to be here with you, Max. I love Fast Company!
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I thought I’d ask why you would leave Google X, arguably the most exciting division of the world’s most exciting company, to sit in front of a camera and teach people statistics? (I’m oversimplifying but you know what I mean). Why launch Udacity?
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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.
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What about the business opportunity? How does that factor?
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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.
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Interesting. One more question from me and then I'd like to bring some readers in.
So here goes: Over the past few years we’ve seen a proliferation of new forms of online learning. We’ve had things like Khan Academy--and even more basic how-to videos--that focus on a narrowly defined subject or skill, as well companies like yours, Udacity, that try to teach entire classes.
I’d like to know where you feel that online education has been most successful and where has it failed to live up to the hype. What should we be proud of and what should we improve? -
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.
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One thing that you have pointed to is the low completion rates of these courses--at Udacity and it's competitors? (Industry statistics suggest it's below 10 percent, I believe.) How serious a problem is that? Is it fixable?
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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.
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While Sebastian answers that I thought I'd post his talk at DLD launching Udacity. It's a great speech--and it helped start a revolution in the way people think about education:
www.youtube.comby Max Chafkin via YouTube 12/3/2013 8:09:03 PM -
Dear Sebastian, I was one of the students of the first "introduction to AI class". I strongly appreciate and support (with a modest word of mouth) your initiative. I am considering enrolling to one/two course(s) of the new #BigData track. To which extent do you think this could help me finding a job in Silicon Valley, one of the most competitive places for IT engineers? Do you have any track record of Udacity alumni in terms of employment? Are the companies participating in the Open Alliance interested in people successfully completing the course? Does the certificate give real chances on the job market?
Thank you and good luck! -
About that AI class: roughly 160,000 people took it. Many students scored higher on the final exam than Sebastian's students at Stanford
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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.
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After the Master from GeorgiaTech, are there any plans to offer a Bachelor's in Computer Science in the foreseeable future?