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Udacity launching paid course enrollment

• Bitwse 13y ago
  Will they be making any price changes to previously free courses? If so, they should be careful because many people have been waiting to take some classes but have put it off for one reason or another. Having them comeback to realize it is paid now might cause several negative reactions.
• sjtgraham 13y ago
  This is like the gym for the mind, i.e. A great place to get in shape, but many people will sign up with great intentions and quickly fall by the wayside. The cognitive dissonance of admitting failure to save some clams will prevent them from cancelling. Genius!
  • dethstar 13y ago
    As you call it gym for the mind, it'd be interesting to see something like netflix for schooling.
    • psbp 13y ago
      What does that mean?
      • jacalata 13y ago
        extrapolating from my experience of netflix...something that you sit down at intending to do 'just one episode' and unexpectedly spend four hours on?
        • psbp 13y ago
          Isn't that the case for all the youtube education series (khan academy for example)?
      • dethstar 13y ago
        Something that you pay a monthly fee for and gives you access to ton of things. In this case, you have to pay per month per course, and the courses come and go.
        • psbp 13y ago
          The content is free, you pay monthly for the coaching and a certificate once you're done. I don't think the courses come and go. From what I've seen, they've only added to existing courses, and have yet to remove any of them.
• antonius 13y ago
  Could just be me, but seems just another pay-to-learn type service. What differentiates Udacity from other similar educational services?
  • btian 13y ago
    Quality of courses. Udacity offers very high quality courses, just like Coursera, not like University of Phoenix.
  • psbp 13y ago
    As I understand it, it's pay to have a mentor and get a certificate. I think the courses are exactly the same as they were before, and just as free.
  • auctiontheory 13y ago
    Some platforms will let anyone teach. Skillshare, for example. Which is fine - you get what you pay for, and occasionally you get lucky. Coursera and Udacity classes are (all?) taught by faculty from name-brand universities. That doesn't guarantee a great experience, but it improves your odds.
  • thatthatis 13y ago
    1) They're still offering free if you go-it-alone 2) Their pedagogical approach is a bit different, with a great learn-do loop 3) Historically their content has been "ivy-worthy"
• martindale 13y ago
  It's great that the instructor-student model is becoming increasingly available, but is this really what innovation in education has come to?
  • thatthatis 13y ago
    Have you taken courses from udacity and their competitors? Even if this move just gives them enough money to keep producing more content, the world is better for it. Udacity:Coursera::Community College:Harvard (and yes, I am qualified to make that comparison, I have taken classes from all four)
    • KurtMueller 13y ago
      So what you're saying is: Udacity:Coursera:Community College:Harvard:?:Profit ?
      • deleted 13y ago
        [deleted]
    • thatthatis 13y ago
      Oops, that should have read: Udacity:Coursera::Harvard:Community College. That's embarrassing.
• jsnk 13y ago
  One thing that continues to bother me about Coursera (haven't tried Udacity) is why courses are offered only for a small window of time with stringent due date requirement. They tout themselves as this revolutionary force in education. Then why are they so insistent on continuing traditional university course model? I wish Coursera would just keep the courses around for people to watch lectures, do exercises and HW.
  • ghaff 13y ago
    There's more or less flexibility depending upon the course (speaking about Coursera). Some of the reasons given for having a schedule are: - Provides a structure that a lot of people find useful - Is necessary for any sort of peer grading - Keeps discussion on discussion board in some degree of sync with the class. If you signup for a class, at least the videos are kept around for some length of time for viewing. That may not be true with grading infrastructures and obviously not peer grading. It's a tradeoff. I came into Coursera thinking that I'd like more flexibility. But I now see the benefits of a more structured approach so long as deadlines aren't too rigid. After all, if you want something totally unstructured, there is lots of video and other material on most topics on the Internet
    • ics 13y ago
      > It's a tradeoff. I came into Coursera thinking that I'd like more flexibility. But I now see the benefits of a more structured approach so long as deadlines aren't too rigid. After all, if you want something totally unstructured, there is lots of video and other material on most topics on the Internet. This is key. I still find myself wishing the deadlines were different here and there (or that they were better distributed... taking 10 courses with everything due in a six hour window Sunday night is annoying and takes being at least a week ahead to avoid). Still, I know that I do better because of it. The peer assessments aren't effective in every course but for some they're absolutely vital. What I'm really looking forward to is seeing how some courses settle, probably after receiving a little more institutional support, into better defined roles. Instead of just splitting up the sequence in terms of "Part I" and "Part II" they could offer exclusively peer reviewed components for people who wish to write papers and a quiz/homework component which then give different certificates (it would be encouraged to earn both). At the moment EdX seems to be the strongest supporter of human review (either peers or TAs) with Harvard courses such as Copyright Law and National Security, but they can do it because the classes are limited to a few hundred people and everyone else must audit.
• ghaff 13y ago
  Interesting to ponder this in conjunction with this Fast Company article on Sebastian Thrun http://www.fastcompany.com/3021473/udacity-sebastian-thrun-uphill-climb http://www.fastcompany.com/3021473/udacity-sebastian-thrun-u... It's hard not to see this move as Udacity essentially getting into low touch (but not lowest touch), presumably high quality self-paced adult education that seems to be mostly focused on practical Silicon Valley-type skills and shifting away from trying to "disrupt" education.
  • psbp 13y ago
    I think it's still disruptive if you can access all of the course materials just as you could before.
    • ghaff 13y ago
      I'd argue though that MOOCs haven't really been disruptive. If you look at the demographics of a typical course, it's primarily people who already have degrees--and multiple degrees in many cases. So they're adult ed to a large degree. Nothing wrong with that at all. I certainly appreciate them in that vein. But it's not a disrupter of education.
      • thatthatis 13y ago
        Do you lump Kahn Academy in with MOOCs when you say they aren't disrupting education?
      • ghaff 13y ago
        thatthatis: I don't think Khan Academy is typically considered a MOOC--in part because it never really AFAIK considered certification as a goal as Udacity, etc. have. I'm also not sure that simply having a bunch of videos available on programming and related topics qualifies as disruptive. It's not a bad thing certainly! But what is it fundamentally changing? "Disruption" is a high bar.
      • darkxanthos 13y ago
        I agree. So far this and others looks more like its disruptive solely within our echo chamber. What will be disruptive though is if Udacity or one of the others can become a credible source for teaching. All of this means nothing on a larger scale unless it gives you skills and abilities others trust.
• erikpukinskis 13y ago
  Am I crazy or do they not actually mention anywhere what the fee is?
  • psbp 13y ago
    Just visit any of the paid course pages. It's $150/month.
  • ericlavigne 13y ago
    It varies by course, so you'll need to look through the catalog. The prices are monthly, and all courses are "at your own pace", but they give an estimate for each course of how long the course will take. https://www.udacity.com/courses https://www.udacity.com/courses Intro to Hadoop and MapReduce costs $150/month (or $105/month early enrollment) for a course that is estimated to take a month. https://www.udacity.com/course/ud617 https://www.udacity.com/course/ud617 Exploratory Data Analysis costs $150/month (or $105/month early enrollment) and is estimated to take two months to complete. https://www.udacity.com/course/ud651 https://www.udacity.com/course/ud651 Data Wrangling with MongoDB is $200/month ($140 early enrollment) for an estimated two months. https://www.udacity.com/course/ud032 https://www.udacity.com/course/ud032
• liyanchang 13y ago
  Scaling an education venture is a hard problem. You work really hard to figure out how to distribute quality content cheaply to lots of people and it turns out that, at the end of the day, it seems that we still rely on labor/cost intensive methods to teach. [1] Clearly, Udacity, edX, Khan, etc are successfully solving many problems (quality content, automated grading, gamification, etc) and that we're moving in the right direction. I've very much looking forward to the day were we start to see education costs decline because we've gotten so much better at mass producing knowledge/love for learning/reasoning skills/etc. [1] As a side note, it's not clear to me if actually reasoning and talking with another human is really required for learning. It certainly seems that way at the moment, but is this because the content isn't good enough or are our brains built in a way that learning requires human interaction?
  • queensnake 13y ago
    > it's not clear to me if actually reasoning and talking with another human is really required for learning. Dialog. Being able to ask questions, to get clarity on some angle that the teacher took for granted, uncovering assumptions / knowledge that the teacher has that the student doesn't.
• thatthatis 13y ago
  There are a few things about Udacity that make it different from yet another TeamTreehouse/Tuts+/Pluralsight/Lynda where you pay to get course content: 1) It appears they're sticking with free if you do-it-yourself and charging for coaching and certification. 2) Their pedagogical approach, at least in the few courses that I took about a year ago, has a tightly integrated learn-do loop. And, going beyond just pausing for a mini-quiz, in the programming lessons you stopped to write actual code and attempted to "make this pass the unit tests." 2b) Being presented with a conceptual framework, given a problem that framework could solve, coding your own, then seeing how Peter Norvig would have coded it was one of the best programming learning experiences I've ever had. 3) Their content has, historically, never dipped below first-rate. The transition to more career oriented skills makes me wonder if #3 might go away, but even if you relax #3, #1 and #2 are better than anything else I'm aware of. I try to consume as much elearning content as possible (ideally 2x the hours I watch tv), and udacity is in my opinion far and away the best producer.
  • psbp 13y ago
    I have the same concern about #3 and even the viability of the certificate/coaching tier. They need to make a pretty compelling case for the certificates as a valid path to employment. Though, I'm happy that they managed to find a strategy to monetization without blocking access to existing course material.
    • thatthatis 13y ago
      Certificates solve a huge issue I've had as an e-learner - getting good credentials for the learning I do electronically. Prior to this it didn't matter how much you learned on Udacity, there wasn't a good way to signal that achievement/knowledge/learning. I'm fine overall because I have traditional credentials that speak well enough and open enough doors for me. A udacity certificate would just be icing to add to my resume. But, the learning Udacity provides is probably most valuable to people who don't have traditional credentials. And, Udacity as an institution is most valuable to the economy/society if we can use it as signals of competence for people without traditional credentials. So I find a lot of reasons to get really excited about this move. I imagine there's probably a budget/frugal hack that would work where you take the course for free, finish it, then enroll in the credential/coaching for a single month. I wouldn't be at all surprised if one-month-cost post-hoc credentialing is an intended feature of their platform.
• fierycatnet 13y ago
  I like Udacity, I did... If they want to monetize some of their content, good, but I wont be participating.
  • psbp 13y ago
    What? This is a pretty great way to monetize without locking down the content itself.
• shreyas-satish 13y ago
  This is a fantastic development, and the one-to-one model is perhaps the logical next step after establishing a one-to-many platform for online education. I have a couple of questions regarding the coaching aspect though: 1. Will the coaching group at Udacity be a walled garden, or is Udacity open to exploring a more liberal scheme by allowing experts from around the internet to help and earn some money on the side? 2. How would they maintain a healthy balance between giving constructive feedback and spoon-feeding learners? To elaborate, while I think one-to-one feedback would be great occasionally, I suspect that students might misuse this freedom. Take IRC forums for instance. It can be quite annoying for experts to repeat answers that are just waiting to be read in the docs. From the learner's perspective, it might just be easier to ask someone rather than thinking through the problem and reading the material thoroughly. As a learner, this can be dangerous habit to develop in the long run. So, I'm curious how this works out in real. But, congratulations and best wishes to Udacity. More and more people, me included, seem to really take to the byte-sized lectures interleaved with exercises. While, the exercises can sometimes tend to be easy (I can perhaps understand why), it's problably not too far away until we have more personalized learning experiences.
• Executor 13y ago
  Quite the opposite, deadlines made me cram and guess the multiple choice since 1/2 weeks per quiz was a ridiculously small amount of time to learn. I was taking both Coursera Computer Cryptography/Networks. If there was no deadline I could absorb the material at my own pace. In regards to marks, fuck 'em. I want to learn, not to get "marks" or a "paper".