<p>Udacity</a> and the future of online universites</p>
<p>I, for one, will be very interested in seeing where this goes. I took his Intro to AI course last semester and liked it for some reasons and hated it for others.</p>
<p>Thoughts?</p>
<p>I’m not very surprised that Thrun would leave academia, at least for the time being. He’d been spending a lot of time at Google working on those self-driving robotic cars, and he’s obviously in the forefront of people interested in delivering free online courses. He’s been at Stanford long enough that the prestige of his background follows him wherever he goes. He must have decided he’s reached the point where he wants to call all his own shots in doing the massive online courses.</p>
<p>Also, I went back and read the article that the OP linked, and it has kind of an inaccurate slant. Stanford very much supports continuing the massively open online course initiative, and plans to expand it every quarter. Thrun’s not leaving because Stanford wouldn’t provide the resources for these courses, as inaccurately suggested by the article. It sounds like he’s just wanting to do it himself and get it going even faster.</p>
<p>I suspect part of the reason for Thrun’s departure is found in this announcement on the Udacity website:</p>
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<p>Emphasis added. Stanford doesn’t have founders’ stock or stock options.</p>
<p>Could be, JHS, though it would be a pretty long-term prospect for a site like Udacity to be sufficiently monetized to make it a realistic IPO candidate. So I doubt Thrun will be hearing a thunderous ka-CHING from this venture anytime soon–if ever.</p>