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I could be wrong, but based on Know Labs own company description: "We're a Silicon Valley-based startup looking to change the future of education by making it

I could be wrong, but based on Know Labs own company description: "We're a Silicon Valley-based startup looking to change the future of education by making it more accessible and less expensive." I don't think the aim is to charge students for courses like ai-class, but rather quite the opposite. It would look to me like the idea is to create a platform to allow universities to create their own version of ai-class. MIT gains a lot of positive press from OCW but it must cost them at least a little staff time and money to maintain and run it. I would guess there is definitely a market for a company to claim "Hey we're the guys behind Standford's famous AI class experiment, and for a price that saves you a lot of work and staff time you can have that same, well known, platform today" Having worked in Universities for years, I know that at the institutional level 'buy-it' almost always trumps 'built-it'.

khafra 15y ago
The AI Class official twitter account asked people whether they'd be willing to pay $2000 for a Stanford-level CS Master's degree taught in a similar format.
- stfu 15y ago
  Do you have by any chance a link to that particular tweet? I have looked through the tweets since September and just couldn't find it. Would love to read what the feedback was on that suggestion.
  - dpapathanasiou 15y ago
    It was from Sebastian Thrun's twitter account: http://twitter.com/#!/SebastianThrun/status/112397835370115072 http://twitter.com/#!/SebastianThrun/status/1123978353701150...
    - Homunculiheaded 15y ago
      And more interestingly he follows up a few weeks later claiming that standford could actually offer the masters for free! http://twitter.com/#!/SebastianThrun/status/117131953714642944 http://twitter.com/#!/SebastianThrun/status/1171319537146429... Free master's in CS from standford is a pretty mind blowing idea. Would be really curious to see what would happen to higher ed if you completely removed/minimized the cost factor.
      - dpapathanasiou 15y ago
        Thrun had some interesting things to say about his vision for the future of higher education: Thrun’s ultimate mission is a virtual university in which the best professors broadcast their lectures to tens of thousands of students. Testing, peer interaction and grading would happen online; a cadre of teaching assistants would provide some human supervision; and the price would be within reach of almost anyone. “Literally, we can probably get the same quality of education I teach in class for about 1 to 2 percent of the cost,” Thrun told me. The traditional university, in his view, serves a fortunate few, inefficiently, with a business model built on exclusivity. “I’m not at all against the on-campus experience,” he said. “I love it. It’s great. It has a lot of things which cannot be replaced by anything online. But it’s also insanely uneconomical.” Thrun acknowledges that there are still serious quality-control problems to be licked. How do you keep an invisible student from cheating? How do you even know who is sitting at that remote keyboard? Will the education really be as compelling — and will it last? Thrun believes there are technological answers to all of these questions, some of them being worked out already by other online frontiersmen. “If we can solve this,” he said, “I think it will disrupt all of higher education.” http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/03/opinion/the-university-of-wherever.html?_r=2&pagewanted=all http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/03/opinion/the-university-of-...
      - stfu 15y ago
        It is also interesting that he phrases it never as a Stanford degree but as a degree "of Stanford quality". It is going to be interesting to see how they will leverage the Stanford brand without discounting it.

khafra 15y ago

The AI Class official twitter account asked people whether they'd be willing to pay $2000 for a Stanford-level CS Master's degree taught in a similar format.

stfu 15y ago
Do you have by any chance a link to that particular tweet? I have looked through the tweets since September and just couldn't find it. Would love to read what the feedback was on that suggestion.
- dpapathanasiou 15y ago
  It was from Sebastian Thrun's twitter account: http://twitter.com/#!/SebastianThrun/status/112397835370115072 http://twitter.com/#!/SebastianThrun/status/1123978353701150...
  - Homunculiheaded 15y ago
    And more interestingly he follows up a few weeks later claiming that standford could actually offer the masters for free! http://twitter.com/#!/SebastianThrun/status/117131953714642944 http://twitter.com/#!/SebastianThrun/status/1171319537146429... Free master's in CS from standford is a pretty mind blowing idea. Would be really curious to see what would happen to higher ed if you completely removed/minimized the cost factor.
    - dpapathanasiou 15y ago
      Thrun had some interesting things to say about his vision for the future of higher education: Thrun’s ultimate mission is a virtual university in which the best professors broadcast their lectures to tens of thousands of students. Testing, peer interaction and grading would happen online; a cadre of teaching assistants would provide some human supervision; and the price would be within reach of almost anyone. “Literally, we can probably get the same quality of education I teach in class for about 1 to 2 percent of the cost,” Thrun told me. The traditional university, in his view, serves a fortunate few, inefficiently, with a business model built on exclusivity. “I’m not at all against the on-campus experience,” he said. “I love it. It’s great. It has a lot of things which cannot be replaced by anything online. But it’s also insanely uneconomical.” Thrun acknowledges that there are still serious quality-control problems to be licked. How do you keep an invisible student from cheating? How do you even know who is sitting at that remote keyboard? Will the education really be as compelling — and will it last? Thrun believes there are technological answers to all of these questions, some of them being worked out already by other online frontiersmen. “If we can solve this,” he said, “I think it will disrupt all of higher education.” http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/03/opinion/the-university-of-wherever.html?_r=2&pagewanted=all http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/03/opinion/the-university-of-...
    - stfu 15y ago
      It is also interesting that he phrases it never as a Stanford degree but as a degree "of Stanford quality". It is going to be interesting to see how they will leverage the Stanford brand without discounting it.