MIT and Harvard announce edX

This is even more true in corrupt countries. The corrupts have an incentive to keep people away from knowing their rights. A large part of knowing your rights comes from education.

But I'm happy we are advancing, I believe education is the foundation of everything, so we sure are making some big steps.

http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/355358/family_first_...

However, it has several big downsides, which result on artificial barriers like absurdly difficult exams (a calculus exam I took had only 2 people out of 1200 passing), quotas on classes or specializations (sometimes decided by scolarship and other times just by random drawings), and some really bad teachers and overcrowded classes (there are good teachers too, and things pick up after 2nd or 3rd year when most people have dropped).

I ended up getting a degree from a private university.

Having all of these online courses and virtual university education does sound really great :)

- Short videos: This have many different advantages and works well if its other properties. Let's you set your own pace, instead of following the long video's pace. Easier to separate topics into different parts you can easily click to go back to. When necessary, it's easier to pause between topics (since the video pauses automatically) for you to take a step back and think about you just learned for a minute. It matches the interpreter nicely, learn something new, try it, learn something else, try it. It allows the instructor to better separate links to appropriate material in the description, by topic.

- Online interpreter and automated tools: I suppose this is one of the reasons why they chose python. Similar to how codeacademy works, udacity is like codeacademy + video instructions instead of text. And this is genius. The videos are taking into account that you have an interpreter with you, and everything is integrated. The lessons, quizes and homeworks are all automatically integrated with the interpreter to make sure that you try out what's being taught and the class can give you instant feedback if you're doing it right.

- Production value: Not only the videos look better, but they are edited to be more efficient. Unnecessary parts are cut out for brevity. The video and sound quality makes sure everything is easy to see and hear. Some other online courses often times display a printscreen of the IDE, with low resolution, which makes the code unreadable. On udacity, the code is always readable and the audio always easy to listen. The better UI makes it easier to navigate. And of course, the superior visual quality just makes the whole thing more pleasant to consume.

These 3 characteristics I wish every online course would try to learn from udacity and implement themselves. It's important to note how these 3 are glued together and help each other. Short videos gives you breaks to use the interpreter. Higher visual quality makes the code easier to read and then try on the interpreter, etc etc Udacity just feels like a consistent and smart bunch of ideas put together to make sure we learn easier. Hopefully, others will evolve with them.

- Udacity sometimes belabors some really basic points. Coursera never gives me that "dumbed-down" feeling. It's more like a real, and challenging, college course.

- Coursera lets me speed up the lecture, as much as 2x, and every time I go to a new lecture it remembers that speed. I managed to speed up Udacity lectures by going to html5 in youtube, but I had to reset it every time I started a new 2-minute segment.

Their advantage isn't just their technology platform, it's that they seem to have impeccable taste and judgment. They aren't just a bunch of MBAs who are 'licensing content' as part of an 'online distribution play' or whatever.

I actually think that Udacity is quite similar to YC circa 2005/2006 in a lot of respects.

I'm currently taking their Machine Learning and Computer Vision courses. The ML course is quite like what you described for Udacity: there are a lot of short lecture videos with questions embedded in them, online quizzes and automatically graded programming assignments. It's a very engaging way to learn and I'm getting a lot out of it. The CV course, on the other hand, has so far just been videos of the professor talking & no supplementary material.

I suspect that Coursera provides the platform and leaves how the material is presented on it up to the professor. The ML course has been run once already, so they presumably have the benefit of experience; whereas it's the first time the CV course has been run so it's quite possible that they just haven't figured out how to take full advantage of the platform yet.

Edit: and I also agree with Brunov, Udacity courses are not mathematically rigorous.

I agree though, the Udacity lectures are more engaging.

It might not seem like an advantage now, since they're competing with more prestigious options from Stanford and MIT, but I think the decision to detach Udacity from Stanford will prove to be a very smart choice. I think we'll see real universities take a two-faced approach to online learning: they will want the attention it draws, but will for fear of diluting the prestige value of their brands. (See the protracted wrangling over the certificates in the original AI course. And can you blame them? The brand is probably the most valuable part of a modern diploma).

This is Udacity's real advantage: they don't have to worry about prerequisites, four-year graduation rates, department budgets, or the physical constraints of offline universities. They are already much more nimble and much less risk-averse than some of the other initiatives, and it will be difficult for the programs still affiliated with universities (institutions hanging on to practices invented in, like, the 13th century) to detach themselves from offline constraints and adapt to the web.

Coursera's delays were because it is much more closely affiliated with Stanford than Udacity is. In the fall they didn't really have the Coursera name settled upon yet and the certificate printouts they sent to people who completed the courses had Stanford's name on them.

Discussions involving university reputations are always going to be long and dragged out. Udacity avoided them by having a clear separation between the website and the institutions of its instructors from the outset. Coursera acquired that separation over time.

Harvard and MIT's reputations are most of what separate them from FullSail and the University of Phoenix. It is important that they protect them. It is encouraging that more universities are following Stanford into this space.

Courses with broadcast lectures and server-based practice/homework/exams will need the (hu)manpower that universities currently command in order to grow quickly.

On the other hand, it can make things difficult for us in the working world who have to balance education with our work life! I'm taking three courses now, which I found out to be overly ambitious (I should probably spend time with my wife!) so I'll probably drop one.

This is a complex issue. Real degree means ID checks, accreditation costs, and testing in person. That costs money. As Sebastian Thrum pointed out recently, those things would prevent most people in the world from taking these classes, and is why he chose not to go that route. For his first AI class he had 160,000 students which spanned every single country on earth except North Korea. In one quarter, he may have taught AI principles to more students than all previous professors in history combined, certainly more than anyone at his university had. He also gave the exact same tests and assignments to students at Stanford for real credit and they did no better than random people in far away lands who were struggling with issues of finding electricity and an internet connection. Forcing to a credit model locks those people from outside the first world out of the system.

What does credit mean? I have taught high school and college classes, and elementary school students. Now I do software and hardware design, and I hire developers. A candidate having a degree has proven to mean absolutely nothing at all as far as technical capabilities go, nor do their grades! About the only thing I know for sure is students from Stanford and MIT are in general more capable than those from a community college, and people with degrees from online for-profit colleges like U. Phoenix and CIS degrees from anywhere can be relied on to not know enough to perform.

So I have to check people's body of work, their projects and interests, and we do proactive recruitment as well. This results in finding talented people. Not "resources" but people.

Someone who has taken a full set of courses at Coursera and Udacity is going to know just as much as someone with a "legit" credential from the university. So what is that legit credential worth? Nothing! Rather than promote more useless credentials, it would be more useful and productive to promote fewer. We should even consider getting rid of degree credentials all together since they don't prove anyone knows anything at all. Whether someone can perform is not correlated to whether they have a degree.