Thank you for that link. I was one of the 160,000+ students in Sebastian and Peter's AI class, and it was a blast. It motivated me to sign up for natural lang

Thank you for that link. I was one of the 160,000+ students in Sebastian and Peter's AI class, and it was a blast. It motivated me to sign up for natural language processing at Coursera, another really fun class. The start of the NLP class was delayed, during which time I ended up taking Sebastian's robotic car class, so I'm somewhat familiar by now with his style and personality. Maybe it's my perspective as a largely self-taught professional, but I always saw Udacity, Coursera, and others simply as continuing education. It was a little strange to see all of the coverage they've gotten as disruptive, threatening to upend higher education. Sebastian fed into this when he gave up tenure at Stanford. He's a type-A personality, a rock star. He can make you an expert in Bayesian probability in one week, write a particle filter "in just five lines of C code!", and truly believes that "now you too can program a robotic car!" The magic of Udacity was that it bridged the gap between self study and filling a seat in a classroom. Besides the skillfully edited videos, there was value in the grades and the deadlines (in part because it kept the discussion forums in sync), and I think it was a mistake to make all of the classes self paced. Peter said in an interview, "In our online class, we give deadlines. Because if you can watch a lecture online anytime, you can watch it ... tomorrow." The paid enrollment is partly about making money, of course, but it's also about restoring a bit of the external motivation that grades and deadlines used to provide.