Sebastian Thrun Resigns from Stanford to Launch Udacity

Written by Sue Gee | I Programmer | 23 January 2012

Professor Sebastian Thrun has given up teaching face-to-face at Stanford position and instead intends to create free courses for Udacity, a new online education venture. Udacity's first two free courses are Building a Search Engine and Programming a Robotic Car.

Attendees at this year's DLD  (Digital Life,Design) , Conference being held in Munich, Germany and livestreamed around the world, were probably expecting to hear Sebastian Thrun say something of Google's Driverless Car project, but that was only covered in the session introduction. (See video below for the full presentation.)

Instead Thrun's talk, University 2.0, was devoted to the idea of online education, in particular the experiences and consequences of delivering the Online AI class.

As Thrun also explains on his homepage :

One of the most amazing things I've ever done in my life is to teach a class to 160,000 students. In the Fall of 2011, Peter Norvig and I decided to offer our class "Introduction to Artificial Intelligence" to the world online, free of charge.

We spent endless nights recording ourselves on video, and interacting with tens of thousands of students. Volunteer students translated some of our classes into over 40 languages; and in the end we graduated over 23,000 students from 190 countries. In fact, Peter and I taught more students AI, than all AI professors in the world combined.

This one class had more educational impact than my entire career.

Speaking at DLD12,  Thrun gave other interesting contrasts between the real-world class and the online one: there were more online students from the small country of Lithuania there on all the courses at Stanford combined and while no Standford student had a perfect score on the course, 248 online students scored 100% - i.e completed the assignments and exam question without a single wrong answer.

Something that I don't think he should be as proud about is the fact that Stanford students abandoned the face-to-face classes for the online version. Instead of teaching the usual 200 students the class size dropped to 30 with the students feeling that the virtual class was better taught and "more intimate".

I can understand fully why Thrun was motivated by the experiences of students who successfully completed the course from war-torn Afghanistan or while coping with domestic turmoil as a single mother. And why he was pleased to discover that 10% (a comparatively very high proportion) of the students were women, making special mention to the Facebook support group, CompScisters , formed by some of them.

But is perhaps depressing that his reaction is to conclude:

Now that I saw the true power of education, there is no turning back. It's like a drug. I won't be able to teach 200 students again, in a conventional classroom setting.

The positive consequence is that Thrun has found a backer with the resources to enable him to offer more free online classes. The Udacity website  is already open for signups and the first two classe are due to start next month.

CS101: Building a Search Engine is to be taught by Dave Evans, Professor at the University of Virginia and Sebastian Thrun, requires no previous experience and aims to teach not only "enough about computer science that you can build a web search engine like Google or Yahoo" in just seven weeks.

CS 373: Programming a Robotic Car will be taught by Sebastiam Thrun and does require knowledge of programming and ideally of probability and linear algebra. All programming will be in Python. 

Thrun is hoping for tens of thousands of students to sign up - and given that CS 373 is a natural successor to the Stanford AI class perhaps this can be achieved.

However, how much of the AI class appeal was due to the Stanford University name and reputation?

Will a certificate of course completion from Udacity have a similar attraction?

While there is value in education for its own sake there is also a perceived value which comes from the association and validation by a respected institution. By leaving Standford behind and forming Udacity the problem that now presents itself is to provide Udacity with the same authority as a Stanford. For now, Udacity is just one of a number of sites and organizations offering online courses, for free or for a fee.

As one of the huge number of students who took the online AI course, the fact that it was the "Stanford AI" course counted for something. Would I have been as happy saying to colleagues and friends - I'm taking the Udacity AI course?

More Information

• Udacity 
• University 2.0 - Sebastian Thrun speaking at DLD 

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• Delay for January Stanford Online Courses
• Stanford AI Class - Mid Term Report

Start Your Online Education at No Cost to You

By By Cody Grant | The Varsity News Life Editor | Updated:  January 31, 2012 22:01

Last year Sebastian Thrun, a research professor at Stanford University and Google fellow, taught more than 160,000 students with one class. 

That's no typo. Thrun decided to make his Introduction to Artificial Intelligence course at Stanford available online – for free – and the people responded. Students signed on from 190 countries all over the world.

Since then, Thrun has left Stanford to create his own free, online school to focus on computer science and programming. The site, known as Udacity, will feature him and lauded Prof. David Evans from the University of Virginia.

I signed up for one of the two classes the professors have set up for this ‘semester' that begins Feb. 20. The class is called CS 101: Building a Search Engine, and for the first time in my life, I'm excited to learn online.

Sure, I've taken online courses through UDM, but only because I couldn't make room in my schedule to attend the classes in person. It wasn't because I wanted to.

As I understand it, there are a lot of classes one takes in his or her undergrad education because the classes are required for graduation. That's fine. And while I have problems with that as well, it is not the subject of this editorial.

What I am suggesting is that we are living in a world that will eventually no longer require students to pay for elective courses.

As tuition debt grows every year, why should students use the finite funds to pay for classes that simply fill up credits on their degree requirements sheet?

Note: I am not suggesting that students should not spend time learning subjects about which they are curious. I just think that, in concert with many of the developing countries of the world, American citizens should complement their educations with what is available to them online.

If you are uniformed about this whole online education movement, the first place you should go is to www.KhanAcademy.org.  It is a website that offers video instruction (for free) on myriad subjects – from algebra to venture capital and investing.

All videos allow for self-paced learning. By creating a login account, students have access to seeing their own progress by way of achievements for each subject.

Personally, I have used Khan Academy as a way to stay interested and informed about art history. Before I came to UDM, I was an art history major but have had to leave that behind in order to get through my undergraduate degree without incurring even more debt.

  For those more interested in technology and programming, there are even more options to learn online. In addition to the new Udacity, there is the The New Boston, Higher Computing for Everyone (by Carl H) and even The Codecademy, which presents users with Foursquare-like badges for completing certain lessons.

Is media arts more your thing? There are numerous Photoshop, After Effects and Pro Tools tutorials you can find via any search engine – all for free.

Of course, one thing with online education is to be aware of your instructors and their credentials. But considering the fact that you are using these sources for elective education, your first priority should be to simply learn as much as you can.

It may be years before this way of learning reaches the masses in Western culture, but it has already proven invaluable to much of the globe without the same resources for education. 

And, who knows, perhaps Thrun's new school will shake up college learning in America. If so, you may just want to go ahead and enroll now so you can tell everyone you were an early adopter.

(Grant is VN campus life editor).