Udacitys Sebastian Thrun Godfather Of Free Online Education Changes - Essay
# Information
- Source:
- Tags: #education
- Notes:
# Highlights
It will be, Thrun admits, “the biggest shift in the history of the company,” a pivot that involves charging money for classes and abandoning academic disciplines in favor of more vocational-focused learning. In short, Thrun must prove that Udacity is something more than a good story.
the shockingly low number of students who actually finish the classes, which is ==fewer than 10%==. Not all of those people received a passing grade, either, meaning that for every 100 pupils who enrolled in a free course, something like five actually learned the topic. If this was an education revolution, it was a disturbingly uneven one.
the reality is that ==the vast majority of people who sign up for this type of class already have bachelor’s degrees==, according to Andrew Kelly, the director of the Center on Higher Education Reform at the American Enterprise Institute. “The sort of simplistic suggestion that MOOCs are going to disrupt the entire education system is very premature,” he says.
“At the end of the day, ==the true value proposition of education is employment==,” Thrun says, sounding more CEO than professor. “If you focus on the single question of who knows best what students need in the workforce, it’s the people already in the workforce. Why not give industry a voice?”
Learning, after all, is about more than some concrete set of vocational skills. It is about ==thinking critically and asking questions==, about finding ways to see the world from different points of view rather than one’s own. These, I point out, are not skills easily acquired by YouTube video.