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Udacity Is Unleashing The True Power of E-Learning With Moocs

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Most of the students irrespective of belonging from India or abroad prefer learning online over attending classes. Honestly, coaching classes are boring when you have to sit for hours and listen to the monotonous lectures. But, the internet has made our life easy, right? And, the MOOCs (Massive open online courses) has made our lives easier.

Everyone will agree that the academic curriculum provides us limited knowledge. What if you want to learn something new that is not in your syllabus? After all, there shouldn’t be any limit to learning. Udacity, an educational organization founded in 2012 provides online courses for students all over the world. The teaching faculties of Udacity belong to some of the top-most universities around the globe.

Sebastian Thrun, David Stavens, and Mike Sokolsky founded this organization to spread the benefit of online education among students and every learning enthusiast.

About the founders

Sebastian went to the University of Hildesheim and studied computer science, economics, and medicine. After this, he went for his bachelor’s degree and graduated from the University of Bonn in 1993. He completed his Ph.D. in computer science and statistics. His career started in the year 1995 when he joined Carnegie Mellon University as a research computer scientist.

He worked as an assistant professor at CMU for many years and also at Stanford University from 2007 to 2011. In 2004, he became the director of SAIL. In 2011, he joined Google and founded Google X. And, in 2012 he co-founded the online private educational organization, Udacity.

David is a very brilliant programmer who graduated from Princeton University at the age of nineteen. He acquired his bachelor’s degree in computer science and completed both his master’s and Ph.D. from Stanford University. David is also very much interested in autonomous cars and he created Stanford’s autonomous car team. He became the CEO of Udacity when it was launched.

Sokolsky went to CMU and acquired his bachelor’s degree in Electrical and Computer engineering. He joined the University of Alberta as a research associate and in 2009 joined Stanford University for the SAIL autonomous driving group. He co-founded Udacity and became the CTO of the organization. He left Udacity in 2013 and joined Spire. He co-founded Artificial in 2018 and serves as an Advisor currently.

Educating the mass

Starting Udacity was a part of a small project whose outcome was shocking to Sebastian. When he taught students in his class he didn’t feel satisfied. He wanted not only to teach only 200 students paying a lucrative amount for higher education but to the entire world. So, one fine day he just started making videos and teaches the same way he does at Stanford.

He gave assignments, tests and followed every step he does with the university students. Sebastian was surprised when he found out that the students who topped the examination learned from the internet and weren’t part of Stanford. This led Sebastian to take the next step and finally to establish an organization.

Story of Udacity

Since artificial intelligence and machine learning is grasping the market in the new world, Sebastian decided to offer computer science courses in Udacity. From the basics to the most advanced level courses were made available. A couple of months after Udacity became public, 90,000 students enrolled for two different classes in this platform. Sebastian expected to hit half a million headcount shortly.

The project was growing in size which attracted few big investors like Charles River Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz. Initially, Sebastian funded $200,000 from his pocket but later in 2012, Udacity received a massive amount of $15 million from Horowitz. After a year, Sebastian said in an interview that his product is very disappointing. Only 5% of the total students enrolling for the courses are completing it.

This is contradictory to his aim for Udacity. And, he decided to shift his focus to the vocational courses for professionals. Udacity expanded its courses and by 2014 it had twelve full courses and, twenty-six free courseware. Within a couple of years, Udacity witnesses 1.6 million users.

Udacity’s next target is to double the headcount in India. Since India is developing exponentially in the digital space more students are expected to sign up for Nanodegree programs on Data analytics, machine learning, etc. Currently, Udacity has 11.5 million users across the world.

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.

sebastian thrun
Image Source: medium.com

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.