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Udacity lays off 125 people in global strategy shift

182 points by acdanger 8y ago

StudentStuff 8y ago
Does getting a nanodegree from Udacity significantly improve ones hirability? For $600, it looks like one gets a shot at a nanodegree that has numerous soft deadlines, but with fixed, inflexible deadlines potentially piling up at the end of the course. In my experience, having a mostly self paced class with no hard deadlines, then a stack of hard deadlines for projects at the very end results in stressed out students and a ton of poorly done work. Choose a model and stick to it, either its self paced with no defined end date, in which case people will learn at their own pace, or its a classic fixed format course, with a list of due dates published prior to the class even starting. Edit: Additionally, the refund window seems much shorter than one sees at traditional colleges and there is still no accreditation for the nanodegrees Udacity lists. At accredited institutions, these types of workforce retraining programs have a bit more heft, and set you up to go straight into a decently paid job. It appears Udacity hasn't solved this problem.
- brylie 8y ago
  Building a portfolio of open source work in conjunction with at-your-own-pace study is a great way to grow and showcase your abilities.
  - StudentStuff 8y ago
    This portfolio is built by committing your classwork to git, I wouldn't say Udacity has this as a particular advantage. If I search for a course, usually the first couple results I'll get are git repos, regardless of the institution offering said course.
    - brylie 8y ago
      Right, building a portfolio isn't specific to any learning platform. When I buy an online course or book, it is often reassuring for me that the course materials are available in an open source repository. This ensures that students can use the course materials in their personal projects, and increases the commonwealth.
- nstart 8y ago
  My pathway to getting a job at Buffer starts partially because of what I learnt in udacity's basic web development course. I had a degree in software engineering already but I knew nothing about actual web development itself. I'd never have started scoring the jobs I wanted that led me to Buffer without the udacity course. Admittedly the newer upfront massive payment is really difficult to stomach. 400 USD or a 100 USD per month for 4 months was ok. 999 for a front end web development nanodegree on the other hand is a tough decision [1]. 250 USD per month is not unreasonable but it makes the choice that much more difficult. [1] https://www.udacity.com/course/front-end-web-developer-nanodegree--nd001 https://www.udacity.com/course/front-end-web-developer-nanod...
- anonymous5133 8y ago
  The accreditation issue can't be tackled until you build high-quality courses in traditional subjects. That's what many of these sites don't get. You need to look at what traditional university is offering THEN REPLACE IT WITH SOMETHING BETTER. Physics 101 and chem 101 are still important and people need to learn these subjects. You can't just build a new "university" and then just have a bunch of buzz word named courses. Until that happens, none of these MOOCs will obtain accreditation from any accreditation organization that is worthwhile. The quality offered by current MOOCs simply do not compare to what you learn from traditional university.
  - barry-cotter 8y ago
    https://www.edx.org/masters https://www.edx.org/masters I count eight Master’s degrees. I’m sure you’ll agree Georgia Tech is an excellent university. https://www.coursera.org/degrees https://www.coursera.org/degrees Ten Master’s degrees including Computer Science from UIUC and a Bachelor’s. As far as accreditation or doing something better than a traditional university look to lambdaschool.com Zero to employment ready software engineer in eight months, not ready to be an intern, not well, we’re desperate we can train you, but solidly capable of most front end jobs, decent coverage of algorithms, data structures and basic computer science. They’re not MOOC as they’re neither massive nor open but they may be transformative.
    - anonymous5133 8y ago
      $20,000 masters degrees isn't what I have in mind, sorry. That's just more of the same old same old. Nothing innovative about that. The whole point of MOOCs is to delivery high-quality courses for free. If there is some sort of fee type system then it has to be affordable for everyone, even for people in places like rural India.
      - dragonwriter 8y ago
        > The whole point of MOOCs is to delivery high-quality courses for free. No, it's not.
jammygit 8y ago
Udacity has been much better than my actual university for almost every topic I've went to them for. I'm sad to hear they're going through this. On the topic, how does their security nanodegree look? It starts early 2019 and I've been seriously considering it.
- darpa_escapee 8y ago
  > Udacity has been much better than my actual university for almost every topic I've went to them for. Which topics, in particular?
  - alexhutcheson 8y ago
    Andreas Zeller's "Software Debugging" course is excellent, although it's a topic that most universities wouldn't offer a full course on.
    - jammygit 8y ago
      What did the course cover?
  - jammygit 8y ago
    git & github, c++ for programmers, and some introductory networking material was very helpful. Their css videos were helpful too for organizing the material in a nice way, and they direct you to the documentation that lets you continue the subjects on your own.
Kaveren 8y ago
> "I founded Udacity so that everyone in the world could get a chance for an education." Why do so many companies feel the need to have a mission to improve the world? Seems disingenuous. There are already superior learning resources obtainable for free (I am aware Udacity offers some free courses). Udacity is not helping anyone get an education out of the generosity of their hearts, they aren't KhanAcademy. Udacity's only real service is offering the intellectual proletariat who lack the will to read spoonfed information.
- jfoster 8y ago
  They would argue that they're bringing the barrier down substantially.
  - Kaveren 8y ago
    In what way? They offer lower quality learning than is freely available for any topic they cover. Paid courses don't bring the barrier down very much.
    - sinstein 8y ago
      I don't feel that the quality is an issue with Udacity. I once paid for an AI Nanodegree course (which I did not complete) and was very satisfied with the course material, assignments, support and evaluation process(es). Maybe there are free university courses that will provide students with more in-depth knowledge but the Udacity courses are designed to be more job-ready and less academic and I think it does a good job at that.
    - icebraining 8y ago
      Unless the course is objectively bad - giving wrong or misleading information, for example - having more always a good thing. Different people learn better from different styles of teaching.
      - Kaveren 8y ago
        I think people use the concept of different learning styles so that there can't be anyone who works harder or is smarter than any other person. Video learning for topics that do not directly benefit from it (learning JavaScript, for example) are geared towards people who are lazy, because it requires them to think less. You can read MDN (which has beginner resources) and come out twice the programmer of any video course. With videos, it's easier to let information wash over you without having to work as hard, and as a side effect, you learn less. Any technical course on Udacity I guarantee I could name multiple written ones that are just better. It's lowest common denominator learning.
znpy 8y ago
Udacity essentially failed in reaching its base goal: becoming an university capable of issuing bachelors degrees, via the mooc teaching method. No wonder it now needs "restructuring".
- gumby 8y ago
  Coursera is going more in the way you describe: you can actually get a university degree from some institutions via Coursera and the degree says "Batchelor of XXX from well-known-university" (not "well-known-university online"). IMHO the big reason for the difference: Udacity original CEO: former professor (Thrun). Coursera original CEO: former president of Yale (Levin). This is not to imply one was smart and one was not; it just shows that the companies' implementations and objectives reflected the backgrounds of the respective CEOs. In the long run I haven't the faintest idea is better. I do find the Udacity web site hard to follow, but I don't care at all about credentials/certification so might find the "nanodegree" idea more practical for my own purposes (compared to Coursera) if I wanted to take a class. disclaimer: my gf works for Coursera, but honestly until she started there the only online teaching company I'd heard of was Khan. I learned all the info in the first two paragraphs from her.
  - anticensor 8y ago
    Are US university presidents not required to be profs?
    - didgeoridoo 8y ago
      They generally are, but I don’t know if there is a “requirement.” Levin, for one, was a professor of economics at Yale School of Management before he became president.
    - ghaff 8y ago
      No. But it’s common in part because the faculty tend not to respect those who aren’t members of the club.
diminish 8y ago
Udacity's clean, curated, well designed approach lost to market based diverse mooc approach by others.
muhneesh 8y ago
I've completed 10 online learning courses and probably spend 20 hrs/week learning online. Udacity Likes: I loved Udacity's production quality & instructors. I think they are generally awesome in the balance of teaching concept and practical knowledge. They also don't shy away from more complicated topics like autonomous vehicles, InfoSec, AI / ML, etc., which is a unique asset. Udacity Dislikes: They are placing too large of a bet on the nanodegree concept. There isn't a clear ROI for students - and it's fairly clear that most companies don't really give a hoot about online certifications. Their classes are too expensive. Both Udacity and Udemy have great Web Dev classes. Udemy's was $10 for 19 hours of content + responses to any questions I had within hours, and gave me everything I wanted + more. Unfortunately, I had to sift through the Bootcamp and Nanodegree madness on Udacity. They are unaccredited. My company (maybe most companies?) only subsidizes classes that are accredited. I have a $10,000 annual credit and I use it all on university classes. I would definitely consider Udacity nanowhatevers if I could use my credit on them.
- bitL 8y ago
  Udemy's $10 courses are killing content creators that just stop publishing anything - would you spend months preparing quality content to get $400 overall earnings? Udacity's ND used to be amazing, their Self-driving Car ND was the single greatest online course I've ever taken in my life. Sadly, they now dumbed it down, made it 2-term (original was 3-term). There were some issues with other NDs where marketing was not translating to real experience, such as AI ND, where 2nd term was so dumbed down it could be finished in a weekend, or the late changes to Robotics ND 2nd term that removed a real robot from the plan and instead offered academic discount on Jetson TX2. Also, Deep Reinforcement Learning project's scope changed massively for worse (instead of robot walking it turned into moving a robotic arm). Despite these warts, where else could you get intro to bleeding edge frameworks like TensorFlow/Keras/PyTorch 2 years ago on complex real-world problems (self-driving car, 3D object recognition etc.)? They simply had no competition there, but that market might be too small. Coursera/edX is way behind the curve with their academic courses.
  - ghaff 8y ago
    >Coursera/edX is way behind the curve with their academic courses. Academic courses aren't usually oriented around "bleeding edge" frameworks etc. That's not a judgement, it's just a difference between how university courses are usually constructed and targeted and how a course/book/tutorial/etc. about some current tech is.
eksemplar 8y ago
I truly don’t get how sites like udacity are able to sell thousands of amateurish introductions to various trends, when you can literally follow CS50 in all its incantations for free on edX.org. Sure it won’t give you a video guide of X popular framework intro-documentation pages, but it will actually teach you CS for free, and I’d argue, that if you can complete CS50x and CS50x Web, then you’ll never need a site like udacity. I guess FOMO sells though.
- dunpeal 8y ago
  > I’d argue, that if you can complete CS50x and CS50x Web, then you’ll never need a site like udacity. Sure, but that's a tiny minority of people. If you have the capacity to complete deep CS courses, you can buy a book for $12 and learn React or Angular or any technology you want. Most people don't have this capacity. > I truly don’t get how sites like udacity are able to sell thousands of amateurish introductions to various trends 1. People read that some trend gets you jobs. 2. People don't have the discipline or enough foundation to just buy the $12 book and learn trend by themselves. 3. People find a course online that is really basic and thus doesn't tax their mental resources while convincing them they'll be able to get job later in the trend. 4. People get job, or they don't (I bet they don't, since having low learning capacity isn't a good predictor for getting a job in an intellectual field), either way Udacity gets paid. It's not a bad business model, but eventually it will collapse because customers routinely fail to obtain the key value proposition: tech skills or a job using them.
  - dvfjsdhgfv 8y ago
    > If you have the capacity to complete deep CS courses, you can buy a book for $12 and learn React or Angular or any technology you want. But this is how you learn new skills, no? People were learning from books for ages. > Most people don't have this capacity. If you can't understand written word, how on Earth could I trust the code you write?
    - lazyasciiart 8y ago
      No, people (on any meaningful scale) have never learned from books without teachers. What scenario were you thinking of?
cheriot 8y ago
> We will increase our investments in growth areas like enterprise and career development I'm surprised the shift has taken this long. Employers will spend massively more on employee development than employees will. Employer: $2,000 for a 5 day class? No problem. Employee out of pocket: $150 for 6 weeks? I wonder if I can just read some tutorials.
- ehnto 8y ago
  Enterprise certification programs are very often money grabs that companies fall for and employees get saddled with participating in. The last thing I am interested in is sitting through a "React Certified Developer" exam. I hope that is not where the industry is headed. It is interesting though, I can imagine it's really hard to hire good talent for many hiring managers because it is difficult to spot who is good or bad. I am sure they wish there was some kind of standard measure like other industries have.
  - cheriot 8y ago
    There's a lot more to professional development than certification bs. I've not done anything on Udacity, but I've spent my employer's money on Coursera before and it was well worth the time. I've also spent 10x the Coursera's price on a 5 day training that was good, too. There's good material out there, money ready to be spent on it, but the the current business model doesn't tap into it well.
  - kgwgk 8y ago
    What standard measure is there in other industries?
- anonymous5133 8y ago
  I also find it ironic that most people take courses that benefit their employers...which really makes you wonder why more companies aren't just offering vouchers for people to buy self-study courses related to improving their productivity.
  - 8y ago
asien 8y ago
Absolutely not surprise. Unicorns like Udacity have extremely high valuation but are barely making any money. Most of their spendings goes into Marketing and not actual R&D for education.
- Neracked 8y ago
  > Unicorns like Udacity I thought that was an hyperbole. Then I checked on Wikipedia: "While not yet profitable as of February 2018, Udacity is valued at over $1B USD having raised $163M USD from noted investors".
  - pluma 8y ago
    Probably a good moment to remember that "unicorn" is an arbitrary label and valuations are entirely based on subjective speculation and extrapolations that may be entirely unrealistic. It's never about how much money a company can make, it's only about how much someone might pay for that company. At the end of the day, a lot of startup investment is more like trading baseball cards than producing anything of actual value to consumers.
- anonymous5133 8y ago
  >Most of their spendings goes into Marketing and not actual R&D for education. My facebook newsfeed is flooded with their advertisements lol and I don't even use the newsfeed much.
edshiro 8y ago
This seems like a necessary reset, especially given their very high valuation. I personally enjoyed most of Udacity's Self-Driving Car Engineer Nanodegree. The content was great and at the time I had a very supportive mentor (gutted they got rid of this feature). Moreover, they have managed to build a large community of current students and alumni who keep in touch even after the nanodegree is over. I would suggest they reduce the number of courses they offer and improve quality. I tend to see them as a more "premium" MOOC but I do agree that quality of content is variable depending on course. Another area they should naturally look at is training for employees in corporations. I really hope Sebastian Thrun can turn things around.
- anonymous5133 8y ago
  I completely agree with the quality arguments. Everyone...let's be honest with ourselves and what we want from these moocs. I don't know about everyone else but what I want is high-quality courses that are online and basically free. Ads are okay and premium features are okay (like live tutoring or a human given lecture). When I say high-quality I want the content to be similar to what you would get from a Harvard, Stanford or other top university in the field in terms of the content. I want to learn the same topics. Don't water it down and make it simple. I want the real deal with the difficulty and all. Once that is accomplished..work on building tools that make these subjects easier to learn. This is quite a hurdle to build but ultimately this is what we need. We need a free online university that teaches the same material you would learn from a top university. I don't like the watered down MOOCs that udacity, coursera and udemy offer.
  - gaius 8y ago
    I don't know about everyone else but what I want is high-quality courses that are online and basically free What you want then is EdX. Every course is backed by a real-world institution that people have heard of, and they are free to audit, pay only if you want the certificate and/or to support their nonprofit mission
    - barry-cotter 8y ago
wpdev_63 8y ago
Not surprised. I took one of their courses and found it to be incredibly shallow in comparison to actual college courses and edx. It's closer to those baby youtube tutorial video than anything that resembles a course. Anyone notice the google trademark has been remove from their android course?
- athar 8y ago
  yeah, and in the course, you do get all those tutorial together. I never actually completed any course there.
notgettingfined 8y ago
Hopefully they make their classes focused more on teaching useful information than trying to make students feel good about completing projects that have the challenging portions already completed. I am going through the self-driving driving car nano degree and I do not see how this could do much to convince an employer you know anything
- anonymous5133 8y ago
  Yeah, that's what happens when you focus on buzz word trends. Self-driving car is a hip term right now but there is a ton of science, math and engineering that goes into it. For Udacity, which needs to impress investors, they need to focus on the money and that is by selling hyped up courses that make people think they're learning something. In reality, it is just the high-level overall of it with nothing significant. If they actually focused on the real science and engineering of self-driving cars then most would flunk of it very quickly...and no one would really want to go that route...unless you are a major geek of course that likes a challenge. The truth is the amount of those geeks that exist is very to the amount that would pay for the buzz word course. So of course udacity is going to focus on where the money is at.
criddell 8y ago
What's the difference between Udacity and Udemy? Are they the same company? Also, I'd love to hear about your favorite online courses. I took Andrew Ng's Machine Learning and Dan Boneh's Cryptography (both on Coursera) and they were excellent.
TheMagicHorsey 8y ago
I paid for their self driving car class, very early. It was a mistake to do that. Not because the class material or teaching was bad. On the contrary it was very good. Rather because they did not let me access the materials after the class was over. They would not let me postpone completion of the class based on my schedule. It was very much like a real course. I thought it would be more like a course that I could complete on my own schedule if I missed their schedule. I didn't want their certificate. I just wanted to learn the material. After paying over $600 for the course, it really rubbed me the wrong way that they shut me out of the course lectures and materials. It would not have cost them anything to allow me to learn at my own pace. But they decided to go that way. One of the points that was really annoying and borderline fraudulent is that their free courses don't operate like that. Those materials are available to you all the time. It's just the courses you pay for where your experience is worse. Go figure. Anyway, $600 was a cheap way to learn the lesson not to buy a course from them again. I really think there's a place for a good company to sell courses on emerging technology, and to charge premium prices. They just have to understand that most people need to be able to tackle the material in a self-paced manner. Some of us have jobs and families.

182 points by acdanger 8y ago

Does getting a nanodegree from Udacity significantly improve ones hirability? For $600, it looks like one gets a shot at a nanodegree that has numerous soft deadlines, but with fixed, inflexible deadlines potentially piling up at the end of the course. In my experience, having a mostly self paced class with no hard deadlines, then a stack of hard deadlines for projects at the very end results in stressed out students and a ton of poorly done work. Choose a model and stick to it, either its self paced with no defined end date, in which case people will learn at their own pace, or its a classic fixed format course, with a list of due dates published prior to the class even starting. Edit: Additionally, the refund window seems much shorter than one sees at traditional colleges and there is still no accreditation for the nanodegrees Udacity lists. At accredited institutions, these types of workforce retraining programs have a bit more heft, and set you up to go straight into a decently paid job. It appears Udacity hasn't solved this problem.

brylie 8y ago
Building a portfolio of open source work in conjunction with at-your-own-pace study is a great way to grow and showcase your abilities.
- StudentStuff 8y ago
  This portfolio is built by committing your classwork to git, I wouldn't say Udacity has this as a particular advantage. If I search for a course, usually the first couple results I'll get are git repos, regardless of the institution offering said course.
  - brylie 8y ago
    Right, building a portfolio isn't specific to any learning platform. When I buy an online course or book, it is often reassuring for me that the course materials are available in an open source repository. This ensures that students can use the course materials in their personal projects, and increases the commonwealth.
nstart 8y ago
My pathway to getting a job at Buffer starts partially because of what I learnt in udacity's basic web development course. I had a degree in software engineering already but I knew nothing about actual web development itself. I'd never have started scoring the jobs I wanted that led me to Buffer without the udacity course. Admittedly the newer upfront massive payment is really difficult to stomach. 400 USD or a 100 USD per month for 4 months was ok. 999 for a front end web development nanodegree on the other hand is a tough decision [1]. 250 USD per month is not unreasonable but it makes the choice that much more difficult. [1] https://www.udacity.com/course/front-end-web-developer-nanodegree--nd001 https://www.udacity.com/course/front-end-web-developer-nanod...
anonymous5133 8y ago
The accreditation issue can't be tackled until you build high-quality courses in traditional subjects. That's what many of these sites don't get. You need to look at what traditional university is offering THEN REPLACE IT WITH SOMETHING BETTER. Physics 101 and chem 101 are still important and people need to learn these subjects. You can't just build a new "university" and then just have a bunch of buzz word named courses. Until that happens, none of these MOOCs will obtain accreditation from any accreditation organization that is worthwhile. The quality offered by current MOOCs simply do not compare to what you learn from traditional university.
- barry-cotter 8y ago
  https://www.edx.org/masters https://www.edx.org/masters I count eight Master’s degrees. I’m sure you’ll agree Georgia Tech is an excellent university. https://www.coursera.org/degrees https://www.coursera.org/degrees Ten Master’s degrees including Computer Science from UIUC and a Bachelor’s. As far as accreditation or doing something better than a traditional university look to lambdaschool.com Zero to employment ready software engineer in eight months, not ready to be an intern, not well, we’re desperate we can train you, but solidly capable of most front end jobs, decent coverage of algorithms, data structures and basic computer science. They’re not MOOC as they’re neither massive nor open but they may be transformative.
  - anonymous5133 8y ago
    $20,000 masters degrees isn't what I have in mind, sorry. That's just more of the same old same old. Nothing innovative about that. The whole point of MOOCs is to delivery high-quality courses for free. If there is some sort of fee type system then it has to be affordable for everyone, even for people in places like rural India.
    - dragonwriter 8y ago
      > The whole point of MOOCs is to delivery high-quality courses for free. No, it's not.

jammygit 8y ago

Udacity has been much better than my actual university for almost every topic I've went to them for. I'm sad to hear they're going through this. On the topic, how does their security nanodegree look? It starts early 2019 and I've been seriously considering it.

darpa_escapee 8y ago
> Udacity has been much better than my actual university for almost every topic I've went to them for. Which topics, in particular?
- alexhutcheson 8y ago
  Andreas Zeller's "Software Debugging" course is excellent, although it's a topic that most universities wouldn't offer a full course on.
  - jammygit 8y ago
    What did the course cover?
- jammygit 8y ago
  git & github, c++ for programmers, and some introductory networking material was very helpful. Their css videos were helpful too for organizing the material in a nice way, and they direct you to the documentation that lets you continue the subjects on your own.

Kaveren 8y ago

> "I founded Udacity so that everyone in the world could get a chance for an education." Why do so many companies feel the need to have a mission to improve the world? Seems disingenuous. There are already superior learning resources obtainable for free (I am aware Udacity offers some free courses). Udacity is not helping anyone get an education out of the generosity of their hearts, they aren't KhanAcademy. Udacity's only real service is offering the intellectual proletariat who lack the will to read spoonfed information.

jfoster 8y ago
They would argue that they're bringing the barrier down substantially.
- Kaveren 8y ago
  In what way? They offer lower quality learning than is freely available for any topic they cover. Paid courses don't bring the barrier down very much.
  - sinstein 8y ago
    I don't feel that the quality is an issue with Udacity. I once paid for an AI Nanodegree course (which I did not complete) and was very satisfied with the course material, assignments, support and evaluation process(es). Maybe there are free university courses that will provide students with more in-depth knowledge but the Udacity courses are designed to be more job-ready and less academic and I think it does a good job at that.
  - icebraining 8y ago
    Unless the course is objectively bad - giving wrong or misleading information, for example - having more always a good thing. Different people learn better from different styles of teaching.
    - Kaveren 8y ago
      I think people use the concept of different learning styles so that there can't be anyone who works harder or is smarter than any other person. Video learning for topics that do not directly benefit from it (learning JavaScript, for example) are geared towards people who are lazy, because it requires them to think less. You can read MDN (which has beginner resources) and come out twice the programmer of any video course. With videos, it's easier to let information wash over you without having to work as hard, and as a side effect, you learn less. Any technical course on Udacity I guarantee I could name multiple written ones that are just better. It's lowest common denominator learning.

znpy 8y ago

Udacity essentially failed in reaching its base goal: becoming an university capable of issuing bachelors degrees, via the mooc teaching method. No wonder it now needs "restructuring".

gumby 8y ago
Coursera is going more in the way you describe: you can actually get a university degree from some institutions via Coursera and the degree says "Batchelor of XXX from well-known-university" (not "well-known-university online"). IMHO the big reason for the difference: Udacity original CEO: former professor (Thrun). Coursera original CEO: former president of Yale (Levin). This is not to imply one was smart and one was not; it just shows that the companies' implementations and objectives reflected the backgrounds of the respective CEOs. In the long run I haven't the faintest idea is better. I do find the Udacity web site hard to follow, but I don't care at all about credentials/certification so might find the "nanodegree" idea more practical for my own purposes (compared to Coursera) if I wanted to take a class. disclaimer: my gf works for Coursera, but honestly until she started there the only online teaching company I'd heard of was Khan. I learned all the info in the first two paragraphs from her.
- anticensor 8y ago
  Are US university presidents not required to be profs?
  - didgeoridoo 8y ago
    They generally are, but I don’t know if there is a “requirement.” Levin, for one, was a professor of economics at Yale School of Management before he became president.
  - ghaff 8y ago
    No. But it’s common in part because the faculty tend not to respect those who aren’t members of the club.

diminish 8y ago

Udacity's clean, curated, well designed approach lost to market based diverse mooc approach by others.

muhneesh 8y ago

I've completed 10 online learning courses and probably spend 20 hrs/week learning online. Udacity Likes: I loved Udacity's production quality & instructors. I think they are generally awesome in the balance of teaching concept and practical knowledge. They also don't shy away from more complicated topics like autonomous vehicles, InfoSec, AI / ML, etc., which is a unique asset. Udacity Dislikes: They are placing too large of a bet on the nanodegree concept. There isn't a clear ROI for students - and it's fairly clear that most companies don't really give a hoot about online certifications. Their classes are too expensive. Both Udacity and Udemy have great Web Dev classes. Udemy's was $10 for 19 hours of content + responses to any questions I had within hours, and gave me everything I wanted + more. Unfortunately, I had to sift through the Bootcamp and Nanodegree madness on Udacity. They are unaccredited. My company (maybe most companies?) only subsidizes classes that are accredited. I have a $10,000 annual credit and I use it all on university classes. I would definitely consider Udacity nanowhatevers if I could use my credit on them.

bitL 8y ago
Udemy's $10 courses are killing content creators that just stop publishing anything - would you spend months preparing quality content to get $400 overall earnings? Udacity's ND used to be amazing, their Self-driving Car ND was the single greatest online course I've ever taken in my life. Sadly, they now dumbed it down, made it 2-term (original was 3-term). There were some issues with other NDs where marketing was not translating to real experience, such as AI ND, where 2nd term was so dumbed down it could be finished in a weekend, or the late changes to Robotics ND 2nd term that removed a real robot from the plan and instead offered academic discount on Jetson TX2. Also, Deep Reinforcement Learning project's scope changed massively for worse (instead of robot walking it turned into moving a robotic arm). Despite these warts, where else could you get intro to bleeding edge frameworks like TensorFlow/Keras/PyTorch 2 years ago on complex real-world problems (self-driving car, 3D object recognition etc.)? They simply had no competition there, but that market might be too small. Coursera/edX is way behind the curve with their academic courses.
- ghaff 8y ago
  >Coursera/edX is way behind the curve with their academic courses. Academic courses aren't usually oriented around "bleeding edge" frameworks etc. That's not a judgement, it's just a difference between how university courses are usually constructed and targeted and how a course/book/tutorial/etc. about some current tech is.

eksemplar 8y ago

I truly don’t get how sites like udacity are able to sell thousands of amateurish introductions to various trends, when you can literally follow CS50 in all its incantations for free on edX.org. Sure it won’t give you a video guide of X popular framework intro-documentation pages, but it will actually teach you CS for free, and I’d argue, that if you can complete CS50x and CS50x Web, then you’ll never need a site like udacity. I guess FOMO sells though.

dunpeal 8y ago
> I’d argue, that if you can complete CS50x and CS50x Web, then you’ll never need a site like udacity. Sure, but that's a tiny minority of people. If you have the capacity to complete deep CS courses, you can buy a book for $12 and learn React or Angular or any technology you want. Most people don't have this capacity. > I truly don’t get how sites like udacity are able to sell thousands of amateurish introductions to various trends 1. People read that some trend gets you jobs. 2. People don't have the discipline or enough foundation to just buy the $12 book and learn trend by themselves. 3. People find a course online that is really basic and thus doesn't tax their mental resources while convincing them they'll be able to get job later in the trend. 4. People get job, or they don't (I bet they don't, since having low learning capacity isn't a good predictor for getting a job in an intellectual field), either way Udacity gets paid. It's not a bad business model, but eventually it will collapse because customers routinely fail to obtain the key value proposition: tech skills or a job using them.
- dvfjsdhgfv 8y ago
  > If you have the capacity to complete deep CS courses, you can buy a book for $12 and learn React or Angular or any technology you want. But this is how you learn new skills, no? People were learning from books for ages. > Most people don't have this capacity. If you can't understand written word, how on Earth could I trust the code you write?
  - lazyasciiart 8y ago
    No, people (on any meaningful scale) have never learned from books without teachers. What scenario were you thinking of?

cheriot 8y ago

> We will increase our investments in growth areas like enterprise and career development I'm surprised the shift has taken this long. Employers will spend massively more on employee development than employees will. Employer: $2,000 for a 5 day class? No problem. Employee out of pocket: $150 for 6 weeks? I wonder if I can just read some tutorials.

ehnto 8y ago
Enterprise certification programs are very often money grabs that companies fall for and employees get saddled with participating in. The last thing I am interested in is sitting through a "React Certified Developer" exam. I hope that is not where the industry is headed. It is interesting though, I can imagine it's really hard to hire good talent for many hiring managers because it is difficult to spot who is good or bad. I am sure they wish there was some kind of standard measure like other industries have.
- cheriot 8y ago
  There's a lot more to professional development than certification bs. I've not done anything on Udacity, but I've spent my employer's money on Coursera before and it was well worth the time. I've also spent 10x the Coursera's price on a 5 day training that was good, too. There's good material out there, money ready to be spent on it, but the the current business model doesn't tap into it well.
- kgwgk 8y ago
  What standard measure is there in other industries?
anonymous5133 8y ago
I also find it ironic that most people take courses that benefit their employers...which really makes you wonder why more companies aren't just offering vouchers for people to buy self-study courses related to improving their productivity.
- 8y ago

asien 8y ago

Absolutely not surprise. Unicorns like Udacity have extremely high valuation but are barely making any money. Most of their spendings goes into Marketing and not actual R&D for education.

Neracked 8y ago
> Unicorns like Udacity I thought that was an hyperbole. Then I checked on Wikipedia: "While not yet profitable as of February 2018, Udacity is valued at over $1B USD having raised $163M USD from noted investors".
- pluma 8y ago
  Probably a good moment to remember that "unicorn" is an arbitrary label and valuations are entirely based on subjective speculation and extrapolations that may be entirely unrealistic. It's never about how much money a company can make, it's only about how much someone might pay for that company. At the end of the day, a lot of startup investment is more like trading baseball cards than producing anything of actual value to consumers.
anonymous5133 8y ago
>Most of their spendings goes into Marketing and not actual R&D for education. My facebook newsfeed is flooded with their advertisements lol and I don't even use the newsfeed much.

edshiro 8y ago

This seems like a necessary reset, especially given their very high valuation. I personally enjoyed most of Udacity's Self-Driving Car Engineer Nanodegree. The content was great and at the time I had a very supportive mentor (gutted they got rid of this feature). Moreover, they have managed to build a large community of current students and alumni who keep in touch even after the nanodegree is over. I would suggest they reduce the number of courses they offer and improve quality. I tend to see them as a more "premium" MOOC but I do agree that quality of content is variable depending on course. Another area they should naturally look at is training for employees in corporations. I really hope Sebastian Thrun can turn things around.

anonymous5133 8y ago
I completely agree with the quality arguments. Everyone...let's be honest with ourselves and what we want from these moocs. I don't know about everyone else but what I want is high-quality courses that are online and basically free. Ads are okay and premium features are okay (like live tutoring or a human given lecture). When I say high-quality I want the content to be similar to what you would get from a Harvard, Stanford or other top university in the field in terms of the content. I want to learn the same topics. Don't water it down and make it simple. I want the real deal with the difficulty and all. Once that is accomplished..work on building tools that make these subjects easier to learn. This is quite a hurdle to build but ultimately this is what we need. We need a free online university that teaches the same material you would learn from a top university. I don't like the watered down MOOCs that udacity, coursera and udemy offer.
- gaius 8y ago
  I don't know about everyone else but what I want is high-quality courses that are online and basically free What you want then is EdX. Every course is backed by a real-world institution that people have heard of, and they are free to audit, pay only if you want the certificate and/or to support their nonprofit mission
  - barry-cotter 8y ago

wpdev_63 8y ago

Not surprised. I took one of their courses and found it to be incredibly shallow in comparison to actual college courses and edx. It's closer to those baby youtube tutorial video than anything that resembles a course. Anyone notice the google trademark has been remove from their android course?

athar 8y ago
yeah, and in the course, you do get all those tutorial together. I never actually completed any course there.

notgettingfined 8y ago

Hopefully they make their classes focused more on teaching useful information than trying to make students feel good about completing projects that have the challenging portions already completed. I am going through the self-driving driving car nano degree and I do not see how this could do much to convince an employer you know anything

anonymous5133 8y ago
Yeah, that's what happens when you focus on buzz word trends. Self-driving car is a hip term right now but there is a ton of science, math and engineering that goes into it. For Udacity, which needs to impress investors, they need to focus on the money and that is by selling hyped up courses that make people think they're learning something. In reality, it is just the high-level overall of it with nothing significant. If they actually focused on the real science and engineering of self-driving cars then most would flunk of it very quickly...and no one would really want to go that route...unless you are a major geek of course that likes a challenge. The truth is the amount of those geeks that exist is very to the amount that would pay for the buzz word course. So of course udacity is going to focus on where the money is at.

criddell 8y ago

What's the difference between Udacity and Udemy? Are they the same company? Also, I'd love to hear about your favorite online courses. I took Andrew Ng's Machine Learning and Dan Boneh's Cryptography (both on Coursera) and they were excellent.

TheMagicHorsey 8y ago

I paid for their self driving car class, very early. It was a mistake to do that. Not because the class material or teaching was bad. On the contrary it was very good. Rather because they did not let me access the materials after the class was over. They would not let me postpone completion of the class based on my schedule. It was very much like a real course. I thought it would be more like a course that I could complete on my own schedule if I missed their schedule. I didn't want their certificate. I just wanted to learn the material. After paying over $600 for the course, it really rubbed me the wrong way that they shut me out of the course lectures and materials. It would not have cost them anything to allow me to learn at my own pace. But they decided to go that way. One of the points that was really annoying and borderline fraudulent is that their free courses don't operate like that. Those materials are available to you all the time. It's just the courses you pay for where your experience is worse. Go figure. Anyway, $600 was a cheap way to learn the lesson not to buy a course from them again. I really think there's a place for a good company to sell courses on emerging technology, and to charge premium prices. They just have to understand that most people need to be able to tackle the material in a self-paced manner. Some of us have jobs and families.