Thrun says goodbye to Stanford (and my robocar); Hello to a world university
It seems that Sebastian Thrun, Google Fellow and research professor at Stanford University, has decided to quit Stanford, giving up his tenure, to start a new online university called Udacity. His goal is to enroll 500,000 students for his first course – which will be free — on how to build a search engine.
Thrun is the key player in Google’s autonomous car project, which seems close to revolutionizing modern transportation by making robocars – self-driving vehicles—possible. Robocars are a audaciously huge project which would significantly improve anyone’s life who wastes time in traffic or on long road trips, but it’s apparently not big enough for Thrun. He recently taught an introductory class to artificial intelligence to a live class at Stanford as well as offering it online for free. He had 160,000 students sign up for the free online class.
Some data points from that class’s enrollment, according to this blog post from Reuters: “There were more students in his course from Lithuania alone than there are students at Stanford altogether. There were students in Afghanistan, exfiltrating war zones to grab an hour of connectivity to finish the homework assignments. There were single mothers keeping the faith and staying with the course even as their families were being hit by tragedy. And when it finished, thousands of students around the world were educated and inspired.”
Thrun apparently thinks that, important and revolutionary though the realization of self-driving cars would be, the concept of freely-available online education, taught by pre-eminent technology leaders, has even more potential to change the world. In the US, over the past generation the concept of a college education has shifted from being an opportunity to learn important ideas that will fit a student to contribute to a dynamic, free society, to getting into an expensive, exclusive club that allow you to rub shoulders with other future power brokers who will protect and enrich the status quo. Is the education itself at Harvard really that much better than at a fine state university? No. But families and students waste an incredible amount of effort trying to get into Ivy League schools to join this club of elites. (And those elites are the same people who brought us the worldwide financial meltdown of the past ten years.)
“Thrun was eloquent on the subject of how he realized that he had been running “weeder” classes, designed to be tough and make students fail and make himself, the professor, look good. Going forwards, he said, he wanted to learn from Khan Academy and build courses designed to make as many students as possible succeed — by revisiting classes and tests as many times as necessary until they really master the material.”
I really want my robocar. But maybe Thrun has the right idea. Higher-education is way past due for a change. Thrun wants to empower an entire world of people who understand technology and will tackle the Big Hairy Problems the world faces. And that’s a Big Hairy Audacious Goal.
SA commented:
This is extremely cool :-)
Steve Nordquist commented:
Neat news; granted, iTunesU is a nice free-stuff repackaging, but rolling risk as an intellectual institution is a canny choice. A good way too, to make compliance and risk be honest with scientists, so Robocars can pass through crush tests in cities of the Americas and perhaps in bus-plungee territory. And here I felt stupid about my commute to a USA college; now it's just the last mile to consider!
ejr commented:
To Ancient Scientist and similar predecessor commentators above I shall note raw intelligence of a group might exhibit a “bell shaped” Normal Distribution but the actual mean will differ dramatically from one population to another. Meanwhile reporter Margery Conner exhibits naiveté when ignoring the true transactional value of “rub[bing] shoulders with other future power brokers.” The decried human pecking order phenomenon is substantially muted in USA compared to other parts of the world and government intervention would only make the situation worse. “Economics” experienced up close and personal is really grizzly and frightening, so grit your teeth and get into the battle because Momma cannot protect her adult children.
TiMan commented:
Bravo Mr. Thrun-- clearly YOUR intelligence is neither artificial nor superficial. The big educational challenge for the USA, however, is literacy. 70% of prison inmates read at or below fourth grade level! And I was told by a former teacher that 50% of the public high school graduates in Oakland, California, are functionally illiterate... no doubt this is why crime is so rampant here.
Sparky Watt commented:
I agree with John L. The world university needs to make money. It can benefit from its lack of real estate and potentially huge classes and charge a tiny amount. $10 per course would still be $1.6 Million, which should be plenty under the circumstances.
But let's not kid ourselves. For classes like computer science, literature, philosophy, and digital art, this is great. For hands-on courses like chemistry, electronics lab, and strength of materials, this doesn't work. There is no substitute for having the right equipment and a teacher looking over your shoulder. Even telepresence can't do that for 160,000 students, and the equipment is expensive.
This will dramatically bring down the cost of a relatively narrow class of courses. A terrific step in the right direction, but only a step.
Devi Null commented:
Is he building a robot car? An American robot car :)
AzmatMalik commented:
the cynic says: Follow the money. Will see if this is really altruistic or has some other motive-agenda for Thurn. Will employers accept this education in place of an MIT diploma?
Dave Eaton commented:
I think it is a great idea. To those thinking that we are going to be teaching other countries all our good stuff- clearly. The wider spread the better. Lots of knowledge and capability is less and less compatible with tyranny. Everyone rising to a higher level of knowledge will not hurt us. Reducing barriers to education will not, either. The evil people have inside will thrive in any case, so this complaint is specious.
And to the comment that we don't need to teach people how to do the same thing- every class in chemistry, physics, mathematics and engineering I have ever taken or even heard of starts introductory students on solved problems. If this were not necessary, traditional education wouldn't exist. So it is kind of a dumb complaint.
99guspuppet commented:
I salute Thrun and will back him up anyway I can...... 99guspuppet
cc commented:
Good article and great content.I'm sure you must be in a rush to post these articles judging from the spelling errors and grammatical flaws. This must not be allowed. It detracts from your hard work and damages your credibility. Dust off your copy of Strunk & White and take the time to be professional. Dashes, hyphens, missing puctuation, and awkward syntax might slide by in tweeting or texting, but have no place in professional writing. Unless you don't care to be regarded as a professional writer.
J.O. commented:
Amen, Amen and Amen!
Mr. Greenwood commented:
Go You Tube U!
First class offered: why robocars are not required.
Ancient Scientist commented:
It has to happen.
The cost of post secondary education has been escalating relative to income excluding an increasing proportion of the population. I happen to believe that intelligence and inspiration are have a generally normal distribution throughout the population so applying an arbitrary economic constraint simply deprives our society and economy of a significant portion of its productivity and rather lowers the average quality of college graduates. This is one possible way of breaking down the barrier. The alternative is a an increasing proportion of rich dolts in the cohorts of college graduates. As the stats show, an increasing proportion of STEM students, in some cases the majority, are foreign students. I guess we can pretend that our high-schools are graduating fewere and fewer qualified students but it ain't so. The sad fact is that there are many, some say up to 700,000, unfilled positions for skilled workers. One more reason for off-shoring R&D. When we see very IP protective industry offshoring R&D programs, we should take that as an indicator of the problem (and, no, it's not some $1.75 Chinese laborer doing the work).
Joos Vandewalle commented:
curious
J.O. commented:
Amen. Amen. Amen.
Godspeed,Professor Thrun.
smartfix commented:
BRAVO!
John F commented:
Phenomenal idea.
It doesn't have to be free. Every student could pay say $10 to pay for the infrastructure and the instructor, and the profs would be highlly motivated to do a great job. Could be highly beneficial to seniors too
Chris commented:
Great to see a leader who is truely out to help, we need so many more of them. Good comments about Ivy league type schools and weed out courses.
BTW - "goodby" is spelled "goodbye" apparently you didn't go to an Ivy league school 8)
Bruce Parsons, Ph.D. commented:
More power to him. I hope he succeeds beyond his wildest expectations.
Fred W. Hensel commented:
The only way these ivy leagues can do the thing you accuse them of is with government collaboration. True individual freedom will not let this happen. (And government infestation has been increasing for many years now.)
Colleges need to have ALL government funding removed, and ideas like this will flourish if the market supports it.
wraisanen commented:
This is the best idea to come out of silicon valley since the FPGA.
SKN NSK commented:
I think more of such audacious initiatives should come out from the so called elusive & "exclusive" Ivy Class - Sebastian Thrun is the NEW REAL Ivy League.
pander commented:
Google may have done the right thing and actually made the search engine more than just ubiquitous; it made it indispensable.
They still didn't get it right from a technology patriot's perspective, nor a true searcher's point of view.
All we need is one more idea to do the same thing. We don't need the same thing; we certainly don't need another search engine that can't grep useful from everything else.
I am designing the next search engine and intend to take on the marvels of the Google empire. As a result, I will not be taking your classes... sorry.
Bill commented:
Tackling Big Hairy Problems with skill to write a search engine? I think not!
BobUrUncle commented:
Bully on you, Mate. This is an idea that's been around for a while but you're the first high profile educator to step forward to execute. Ideas are a dime a dozen but execution is not. Good Luck and God Bless...Now if you could only convince the Educational Testing Service to confer the tests so students can get a degree at the end of the program, that would be something. Otherwise it's just a self study program.
TKucklick commented:
Intersect this with Charles Murray's article in the Wall Street Journal on "The New American Divide" and yo see why parents spend absurd amounts of money to get their kids in the "Ivy's"
Nick Ng commented:
He is a great professor.
Robert Czarnek commented:
What a great idea. Let’s teach Chinese, Indians and others how to better compete with us. Let’s teach the Muslims how to build better bombs. Let’s just give away all the intellectual property this country accumulated. At the same time let’s let the teachers’ union kill what is left of the American education. Aha, let’s do it for free. Once we are done let’s get together, get stoned and sing Kumbaya.
UncommonSense commented:
This is the future of education for sure. Knowledge is a right.
Carl commented:
What an outstand idea !! Go Thrun !!
yky9c commented:
Count us in: Please connect us with admissions.
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David Haworth commented:
iTunesU is already a free world university with wide variety of classes from Standord, MIT, etc.
magie commented:
This sounds wonderful to get a free education on line. Especially the lessons can ber replay as many times as student can or want to absorb the material and content (include glossary/terminolgy). There is no end to learning.. We will up todate on technology.
Maninder Syalee commented:
Please count me in as a student.
ms0650@yahoo.com
Elvis-Presley commented:
Boy he's going to make alot of rich people very unhappy. Tenured teachers, textbook companies, the universities themselves - all are bound to loose LOTS of money if he succeedes...
Go for it! This would help to improve all of mankind by taking away the artificial barriers put up by those making the money on this university game. I hope he tears them a new one!
Suzanne Deffree commented:
I've already signed up for his free CS 101 class. Thansk for the pointer.
