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2U

2U, a company providing educational services in the era of online learning.

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2U is an American company founded in 2008 for providing educational services. The founders of the company are John Katzman, Jeremy Johnson, and Christopher J. Paucek. The main idea behind founding 2U is to provide proper online degree and non-degree programs. Its headquarters is based in Lanham, Maryland, US and it is currently serving users on a global scale. 2U mainly provided a SaaS platform to its clients (educational institutions) and along with coursework design and infrastructure support. 

About 2U

2U has always focussed on providing top-quality online education and services by establishing contracts with top-tier partners. Recently, the company has acquired edX (an American MOOCs provider that was created by Harvard and MIT) which has led to its exposure to a broader audience base and hence more opportunity for growth. 2U to date has collaborated with more than 230 top-class universities to create approximately 3,500 digital programs. The company has more than 40 million global learners who are benefiting from the services of 2U. Recently, the company has also announced a partnership with the University of Singapore intending to expand online professional education. 

Early Days

In 2008, the co-founder of The Princeton Review, John Katzman founded 2U originally naming it 2tor after his pet dog. He decided to bring two other important members on board who were Christopher Paucek who was the former CEO of Hooked on Phonics and Jeremy Johnson, a tech entrepreneur. These three together became the co-founders of 2U. 

When they started the company, Paucek became the CEO of the business and he is continuing to be so even today. The co-founders saw this business sector as a good opportunity and during that time there were very few top-tier universities that provided online instruction. In 2009, the company rolled out its first online teaching degree in collaboration with the University of Southern California (USC). Later, the company again collaborated with USC to launch an online degree in social work. 

In 2011 two new universities partnered with 2U, namely, Georgetown University’s School of Nursing and Health and Kenan-Flagler Business School (University of North Carolina). The latter started offering an online MBA degree through 2U. In 2012, John Katzman left the 2U team to launch Noodle Partners (a company in the education management sector). 

2U
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Success and Growth

As the number of universities partnered with 2U kept increasing every day, the company became more famous. This eventually led the company to raise $10 million in venture capital in 2013 and went public in the next year by offering 9.2 million shares. In the same year, two new members joined the board of the company, Sallie Krawcheck, and Earl Lewis. By the end of 2014 schools like Northwestern University and the University of California, Berkeley signed up with 2U for offering online degrees. In 2015, Yale University partnered with 2U to offer a full-time, online master of medical science degree.  By the end of the year, more than 12,000 students enrolled in the 2U platform.

In 2017, as a part of 2U’s strategy, it started acquiring education companies. It included GetSmarter and Trilogy Education. In 2018, the company partnered with Harvard University to offer the Harvard Business Analytics Program (HBAP) for experienced professionals. It also tied up with the University of London to offer its first undergraduate program. The company witnessed a large growth in its gross revenue during 2020 because of the shifting of education to online learning. To expand 2U more in the online marketplace, it acquired edX in June 2021 for $800 million in cash. 

About the Founders

John Katzman is a famous personality in the American EdTech sector who has established many companies to assist students with their careers. He attended Princeton University and later co-founded The Princeton Review and served as its CEO until 2007. He is currently the CEO of The Noodle Companies. 

Jeremy Johnson apart from co-founding 2U also co-founded Andela and currently serving as its CEO. He was featured in Forbes 30 under 30 for two years consecutively. 

Christopher Paucek is the co-founder and current CEO of 2U. He received several highly-rated CEO awards from Glassdoor. In 1993, he co-founded his first company, Cerebellum Corporation, and also served as the CEO of Smarterville Inc before co-founding 2U. 

Sebastian Thrun : Father of Self-Driving Car & the Famous Educator who Founded Udacity

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Education is the biggest asset, but not everyone is able to get it due to many reasons like lack of money or resources. But to solve this problem, Sebastian Thrun, the famous educator, inventor, computer scientist and entrepreneur, took the initiative and founded Udacity. Many people might not be aware of this educational platform, but there are millions of people who actually have taken its advantage and have educated themselves. This online platform is providing academic as well as vocational educational courses to a global user base to help them get the best suitable job for them.

Early Life

Sebastian Thrun was born on 14 May 1967 in Solingen, West Germany to Winfried and Kristin Thrun. He completed a diploma in Computer Science, Economics and Medicine from the University of Hildesheim in 1988. In 1995, he received a PhD degree from the University of Bonn.

Thrun was always interested in robotics and automotive technologies. In 1994, he started working on the Rhino project under the guidance of his doctoral thesis advisor Armin B. Cremers.

Career

After completing his education, Thrun started working at the Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) as a research computer scientist. It was Thrun, who built the world’s first robotic tour guide along with his fellows at CMU, Wolfram Burgard and Dieter Fox, for the Deutsches Museum Bonn, in 1997. Another robot that he built was implanted at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History in Washington, DC, for a period of two weeks that guided over ten thousands of tourists.

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In 1998, he was appointed as the assistant professor at the Robot Learning Laboratory of the university. Later, he co-founded a Master’s Program in Automated Learning and Discovery, along with the other faculty members. The course later became a PhD program for the students of CMU. At CMU he also built a humanoid interactive CMU/Pitt Nursebot and developed my mapping robots.

In 2003, he left CMU to join the Standford University as the associate professor and in 2004, he was promoted as the director of SAIL (Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory). In 2005, he started working on a new robot Stanley and made an entry in the DARPA Grand Challange. His robot won the first price.

In 2007, he again participated in the DARPA Urban Challenge with his robot “Junior” and won the second prize. Later in the same year, Thrun along with many Standford University students joined Google as sabbatical and co-developed the Google Street View.

After working for a period of seven years at Standford, in 2011, Thrun left the job to join Google as a Google fellow. He then attained the post of VP at Google and worked at on development of the Google driverless car system. At Google, he also founded Google X, where he founded Google Glass. In late 2011, he was introduced to Artificial Intelligence at Google, which was the biggest influence for him to start Udacity.

Founding Udacity

In January 2012, Thrun founded Udacity with David Stavens and Mike Sokolsky, a MOOC website, where he would teach people about everything. He sent e-mails to his students and to the people who were known to him about the website and asked them to enrol for the courses. For his surprise, he received 160000 enrollments for a class on Introduction to Artificial Intelligence, and more people joined from out of Standford. There were students who had never been to college, few were single moms and even students from war zone areas like Afghanistan joined the class. The platform was free, and Thrun was offering the same education to people that a Standford University student was getting by paying $58000 per year.

The company received its first investment from the venture capital firm, Charles River Ventures, and Thrun put his personal money worth $200,000 into it. In October 2012, Andreessen Horowitz invested $15 million in Udacity. By 2014, the company was teaching 12 full courses and 26 free courseware to 1.6 million global users.

Udacity basically partners with Universities and MNCs, to prepare courses that can help the students prepare for the competition and get the right job. The platform provides proper grades and certifications to the students on the basis of their performance in the tests.

In 2005, Thrun was named among the ‘Brilliant 5 by Popular Science’. He has been also awarded the Max-Planck-Research Award (2011), the Inaugural AAAI Ed Feigenbaum Prize (2011), Global Thinker number 4 by Foreign Policy (2012), ALVA Award by 99U (2013), and number 17 Influential Educator, by Noodle (2014), etc.

He has also co-authored a book named ‘Probabilistic Robotics’ along with his long-term co-workers Dieter Fox and Wolfram Burgard, which is a best seller in the Japanese market.