Free Republic

Students may be increasingly opting to get their degrees online but universities still dismiss them as a fad. “Udacity does have one partnership with a research university—Georgia Tech,” Udacity’s vice president of business development Clarissa Shen said on December 16, 2014 at the Center for American Progress. “They have grown their program four fold.” For most brick and mortar universities, enrollment drops are the norm. It turns out that, although online courses are not capital intensive in the traditional sense of real estate to support brick and mortar classrooms, they do not come cheap. At the CAP event, Anne Wintroub...

Georgia Institute of Technology has announced a partnership with Udacity to offer an online Masters Degree in Computer Science for $7,000, down 80% from the existing cost of $40,000 for the on-campus, instructor led program. Suddenly, masters programs around the country will have to compete with Georgia Tech‘s $7,000 program, and that won’t be easy or fast in coming. The traditionally taught graduate degree in computer science at Georgia Tech is a very well regarded program that is in high demand and has very positive outcomes in terms of jobs and earnings. Georgia Tech graduates tend to do very well...

Using Khan Academy as inspiration, Sebastian Thrun decided to bring his Stanford class on artificial intelligence online. Anyone could sign up for free. And 160,000 people from around the world did. He saw the power of creating interactive lectures and distributing them for free. He left Stanford and launched Udacity, a company focused on bringing free university-level education to the world. In the interview above, Sebastian Thrun, Co-Founder of Udacity, talks about how he will help students improve their careers, whether or not the goal is to replace traditional universities, how the classes are different from iTunes U style taped...