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I completed a bunch of courses at Udacity before they introduced the Nanodegree programs. I enjoyed the experience and gained useful knowledge in areas that my

by matt_j 8y ago

I completed a bunch of courses at Udacity before they introduced the Nanodegree programs. I enjoyed the experience and gained useful knowledge in areas that my regular degree program didn't cover (brushed up on Stats, Python web programming, JavaScript graphics, etc), but free courses doesn't seem like a viable business platform. The Nanodegree programs are not free, and from the courses that are included it's clear that you would gain valuable skills, but are they recognized as a qualification in industry at large? I'm sure some employers would consider them, but would enough employers? Regardless, it's a fantastic service that they offer, and I'm grateful for it. Hopefully they can keep the ball rolling and pivot to a place that is profitable enough for them to continue.

dooes 8y ago
There wasn’t enough innovation. What they offer is replaceable instantly by any single university in the world which offers a course for free and hosted on YouTube. I don’t have a solution but I think online education has not been solved. Clearly there is a lot of innovation but nobody is making it.
- cinquemb 8y ago
  >What they offer is replaceable instantly by any single university in the world which offers a course for free and hosted on YouTube. I completely agree with this. >I don’t have a solution but I think online education has not been solved. Clearly there is a lot of innovation but nobody is making it. I don't think the problem is online education, I think problem with these ed-tech companies is that they still are trying compete with the credentialing system of universities without access to all the student loan debt the latter have access to. Gotta love the choices HS graduates can get funneled into/ reinforced by mainstream opinion today: bootcamps, nanodegrees, or loading up on student loan debt if you can edge out agaisnt the legacy/bribery admits. I think what people are really trying to solve is a cheaper credentialing system, that get's distorted by some of the incentives involved.
  - Gene_Parmesan 8y ago
    > trying to compete with the credentialing system of universities Which gets even more difficult when places like Georgia Tech are offering fully accredited Masters of Science in Comp Sci programs, delivered fully online, for a grand total of $7500 in tuition. I don't think any sort of 'certificate' or accreditation approach was the right strategy for them. I was probably their prime candidate for paid certs -- I am a lawyer who self-studied CS for 4 years and just recently successfully switched careers to software dev. I took so many online courses -- Coursera, edX, MIT's OpenCourseWare, Stanford's online courses. In every interview I had, the interviewers were impressed by the fact I took such a variety of courses (I listed them on my resume, underneath my "real" education history.) But not a single one ever even asked if I had obtained any sort of certificates from them. No one cared, not even for a second. The whole story you want to tell when you go this way is, "I got the practical learning and experience I needed; I didn't go for an official degree because I felt the piece of paper wasn't worth the money." The proof (for potential employers) that you succeeded is in your abilities -- specifically, your portfolio of personal projects you create and are ready to present. Taking all those online courses shows initiative, curiosity, passion for the field; a certificate of any sort from some place like Udacity means less than nothing. Would it have mattered any more if it was accredited by some accrediting body? My intuition says no. Employers feel comfortable relying on traditional degrees because they're, well, traditional. There's the whole cultural significance of them, and of the experience of attending a four year program. But, right or wrong, the value of these degrees comes from the school name. Is it a nationally known school? Or a regionally known one? Is it a school in the city that your interviewer (or their coworkers) attended? But if you come to them with some accredited papers from Udacity, there is going to be a very wide respectability gap that will have to be crossed. It's not an inspiring approach, but I can't help but feel like a bland subscription model is probably the best they could have done. Maybe they could have become Google's Pluralsight or something. I think there's still definitely room for 'disruption' in the online education space, but I think it's probably going to look and feel a lot more like traditional higher ed than many might have thought 5 years ago -- even to the extent that I think we'll see traditional schools leading the way, because those traditional schools come to the starting block already carrying a lot of cachet. Why pay for a piece of paper if the name at the top means nothing?
- christudor 8y ago
  This. One of the strangest things about the MOOC boom in 2012/13 was the fact that so much of what they were doing already existed. Taking a pre-existing paid-for product and giving it away for free is not innovation, especially when you can only give it away for free because of external funding.
  - debacle 8y ago
    Finding a way to provide quality, accredited credit hours for 1/5th of what you'd pay at a community college, and at the same time opening the doors to federal funding dollars, should have been a paramount goal.
    - povertyworld 8y ago
      The problem is if it's accredited then instead of just offering reviewed "iterate till you pass" programming projects, they will have to have high stakes "cram and regurgitate" style exams which are a staple of accredited higher ed. If you go for that stuff, why not just enroll in a university somewhere?
      - dooes 8y ago
        That is precisely the conclusion the market has come to, and why they are having issues. Though their target audience is actually the professional working folk.. who don’t have the motivation and time to work on deadlines projects or the willpower to finish non deadlines projects and hw. Overall the business case seems difficult
        tdhz77 8y ago
        Dr. David Harpool talks about this in his book survivor college. Basically argues that the market aka the board makes horrible decisions for education. Survivor College https://www.amazon.com/dp/1593300670/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_mYxRCbMQTSQRW https://www.amazon.com/dp/1593300670/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_mY...
        indigochill 8y ago
- povertyworld 8y ago
  When you watch a class on youtube no one is reviewing your projects. Obviously that is the difference. Do you think someone who watches CS193P on youtube is going to get the same out of it as someone who does the iOS nanodegree?
  - colmvp 8y ago
    I would guess CS193P is probably more in depth just in their lecture content alone than the Nanodegree lecture content. And I can't speak to every Nanodegree, but the projects I worked on in my Nanodegree were 'easy' enough that it wasn't hard for the reviewers to mark. There wasn't a ton of room for creativity. Most importantly, their feedback was pretty mixed in terms of how in-depth they went. Often, they'd just link me to posts from other real-life experts to the point where I felt like I was getting most of the 'juice' from outside of Udacity.
    - povertyworld 8y ago
      CS193P is a few lectures on Swift, a couple on MVC, and then the rest is just a different part of the iOS SDK every day. It's certainly good, and whenever they publish a new semester, I watch it, but it's not like there's some special Stanford magic there.
colmvp 8y ago
I took one of their Nanodegrees a while back. On the one hand, I wouldn't say it was a total waste of money. The production value of the videos was very good, the Jupyter notebooks were invaluable as practice, and the structure was passable. On the other hand, I felt like they should've focused more on having deeper courses. It tried going into too many topics in such a short amount of time. To add, the amount of lecture material was far too small compared to a typical university course, which I was okay with since some university's posted related lecture material online. In retrospect, it was a fine course as an introduction, but as a paid course for a Nanodegree I wouldn't have recommended it to others. I think people would be better off spending that money on books which go far deeper into whatever material they are interested in, alongside watching university video lectures on YouTube, reading personal posts by practicing experts and research papers.
- lfowles 8y ago
  That's exactly how I felt about the first half of the robotics nanodegree I took and the reason I didn't pursue the second half.
- jammygit 8y ago
  Agreed, they offer a lot of good introductory material but skimp heavily of deep or more technical topics
SilasX 8y ago
I felt cheated by the Nanodegrees. They were taught by embodiments of the fake-it-till-you-make-it philosophy. At least, the React one was. When I asked questions about the errors I was getting, Richard Kalehoff —- the literal face of the course! — answered and clearly did not know what was going on. He told me things that flatly contradicted the documentation and couldn’t do much more than to say “try copying the example”. To my shame, I paid $800 to learn from people who weren’t much farther ahead on the material, and in some aspects were behind me. Edit: earlier comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18596450#18601298 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18596450#18601298 Link to the course where Kalehoff’s face is on the landing page: https://www.udacity.com/course/react-nanodegree--nd019 https://www.udacity.com/course/react-nanodegree--nd019
- henryw 8y ago
  I have taken a few ND, and I feel that the React ND was the best and most practical one. I used it at work, where as none of the other ones applied.
christudor 8y ago
Does Udacity have any brand value? Does anyone care that a course is a Udacity course as opposed to (e.g.) an edX or Coursera one?
- riffraff 8y ago
  edX and Coursera also only offer certifications that you passed a class for money now. You can still take the classes on your own but have no "proof" (It's arguable that certification has any value for your career, but I did like the "I unlocked an achievement!" feeling..)
  - sct202 8y ago
    Yeah I think it's interesting that the proof is being sold, when things like college degrees rarely get checked.

by matt_j 8y ago

dooes 8y ago

There wasn’t enough innovation. What they offer is replaceable instantly by any single university in the world which offers a course for free and hosted on YouTube. I don’t have a solution but I think online education has not been solved. Clearly there is a lot of innovation but nobody is making it.

cinquemb 8y ago
>What they offer is replaceable instantly by any single university in the world which offers a course for free and hosted on YouTube. I completely agree with this. >I don’t have a solution but I think online education has not been solved. Clearly there is a lot of innovation but nobody is making it. I don't think the problem is online education, I think problem with these ed-tech companies is that they still are trying compete with the credentialing system of universities without access to all the student loan debt the latter have access to. Gotta love the choices HS graduates can get funneled into/ reinforced by mainstream opinion today: bootcamps, nanodegrees, or loading up on student loan debt if you can edge out agaisnt the legacy/bribery admits. I think what people are really trying to solve is a cheaper credentialing system, that get's distorted by some of the incentives involved.
- Gene_Parmesan 8y ago
  > trying to compete with the credentialing system of universities Which gets even more difficult when places like Georgia Tech are offering fully accredited Masters of Science in Comp Sci programs, delivered fully online, for a grand total of $7500 in tuition. I don't think any sort of 'certificate' or accreditation approach was the right strategy for them. I was probably their prime candidate for paid certs -- I am a lawyer who self-studied CS for 4 years and just recently successfully switched careers to software dev. I took so many online courses -- Coursera, edX, MIT's OpenCourseWare, Stanford's online courses. In every interview I had, the interviewers were impressed by the fact I took such a variety of courses (I listed them on my resume, underneath my "real" education history.) But not a single one ever even asked if I had obtained any sort of certificates from them. No one cared, not even for a second. The whole story you want to tell when you go this way is, "I got the practical learning and experience I needed; I didn't go for an official degree because I felt the piece of paper wasn't worth the money." The proof (for potential employers) that you succeeded is in your abilities -- specifically, your portfolio of personal projects you create and are ready to present. Taking all those online courses shows initiative, curiosity, passion for the field; a certificate of any sort from some place like Udacity means less than nothing. Would it have mattered any more if it was accredited by some accrediting body? My intuition says no. Employers feel comfortable relying on traditional degrees because they're, well, traditional. There's the whole cultural significance of them, and of the experience of attending a four year program. But, right or wrong, the value of these degrees comes from the school name. Is it a nationally known school? Or a regionally known one? Is it a school in the city that your interviewer (or their coworkers) attended? But if you come to them with some accredited papers from Udacity, there is going to be a very wide respectability gap that will have to be crossed. It's not an inspiring approach, but I can't help but feel like a bland subscription model is probably the best they could have done. Maybe they could have become Google's Pluralsight or something. I think there's still definitely room for 'disruption' in the online education space, but I think it's probably going to look and feel a lot more like traditional higher ed than many might have thought 5 years ago -- even to the extent that I think we'll see traditional schools leading the way, because those traditional schools come to the starting block already carrying a lot of cachet. Why pay for a piece of paper if the name at the top means nothing?
christudor 8y ago
This. One of the strangest things about the MOOC boom in 2012/13 was the fact that so much of what they were doing already existed. Taking a pre-existing paid-for product and giving it away for free is not innovation, especially when you can only give it away for free because of external funding.
- debacle 8y ago
  Finding a way to provide quality, accredited credit hours for 1/5th of what you'd pay at a community college, and at the same time opening the doors to federal funding dollars, should have been a paramount goal.
  - povertyworld 8y ago
    The problem is if it's accredited then instead of just offering reviewed "iterate till you pass" programming projects, they will have to have high stakes "cram and regurgitate" style exams which are a staple of accredited higher ed. If you go for that stuff, why not just enroll in a university somewhere?
    - dooes 8y ago
      That is precisely the conclusion the market has come to, and why they are having issues. Though their target audience is actually the professional working folk.. who don’t have the motivation and time to work on deadlines projects or the willpower to finish non deadlines projects and hw. Overall the business case seems difficult
      - tdhz77 8y ago
        Dr. David Harpool talks about this in his book survivor college. Basically argues that the market aka the board makes horrible decisions for education. Survivor College https://www.amazon.com/dp/1593300670/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_mYxRCbMQTSQRW https://www.amazon.com/dp/1593300670/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_mY...
      - indigochill 8y ago
povertyworld 8y ago
When you watch a class on youtube no one is reviewing your projects. Obviously that is the difference. Do you think someone who watches CS193P on youtube is going to get the same out of it as someone who does the iOS nanodegree?
- colmvp 8y ago
  I would guess CS193P is probably more in depth just in their lecture content alone than the Nanodegree lecture content. And I can't speak to every Nanodegree, but the projects I worked on in my Nanodegree were 'easy' enough that it wasn't hard for the reviewers to mark. There wasn't a ton of room for creativity. Most importantly, their feedback was pretty mixed in terms of how in-depth they went. Often, they'd just link me to posts from other real-life experts to the point where I felt like I was getting most of the 'juice' from outside of Udacity.
  - povertyworld 8y ago
    CS193P is a few lectures on Swift, a couple on MVC, and then the rest is just a different part of the iOS SDK every day. It's certainly good, and whenever they publish a new semester, I watch it, but it's not like there's some special Stanford magic there.

colmvp 8y ago

I took one of their Nanodegrees a while back. On the one hand, I wouldn't say it was a total waste of money. The production value of the videos was very good, the Jupyter notebooks were invaluable as practice, and the structure was passable. On the other hand, I felt like they should've focused more on having deeper courses. It tried going into too many topics in such a short amount of time. To add, the amount of lecture material was far too small compared to a typical university course, which I was okay with since some university's posted related lecture material online. In retrospect, it was a fine course as an introduction, but as a paid course for a Nanodegree I wouldn't have recommended it to others. I think people would be better off spending that money on books which go far deeper into whatever material they are interested in, alongside watching university video lectures on YouTube, reading personal posts by practicing experts and research papers.

lfowles 8y ago
That's exactly how I felt about the first half of the robotics nanodegree I took and the reason I didn't pursue the second half.
jammygit 8y ago
Agreed, they offer a lot of good introductory material but skimp heavily of deep or more technical topics

SilasX 8y ago

I felt cheated by the Nanodegrees. They were taught by embodiments of the fake-it-till-you-make-it philosophy. At least, the React one was. When I asked questions about the errors I was getting, Richard Kalehoff —- the literal face of the course! — answered and clearly did not know what was going on. He told me things that flatly contradicted the documentation and couldn’t do much more than to say “try copying the example”. To my shame, I paid $800 to learn from people who weren’t much farther ahead on the material, and in some aspects were behind me. Edit: earlier comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18596450#18601298 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18596450#18601298 Link to the course where Kalehoff’s face is on the landing page: https://www.udacity.com/course/react-nanodegree--nd019 https://www.udacity.com/course/react-nanodegree--nd019

henryw 8y ago
I have taken a few ND, and I feel that the React ND was the best and most practical one. I used it at work, where as none of the other ones applied.

christudor 8y ago

Does Udacity have any brand value? Does anyone care that a course is a Udacity course as opposed to (e.g.) an edX or Coursera one?

riffraff 8y ago
edX and Coursera also only offer certifications that you passed a class for money now. You can still take the classes on your own but have no "proof" (It's arguable that certification has any value for your career, but I did like the "I unlocked an achievement!" feeling..)
- sct202 8y ago
  Yeah I think it's interesting that the proof is being sold, when things like college degrees rarely get checked.