Wednesday, February 01, 2012

I wish I could do this - Professor quits Stanford to teach online

Nadine Arendse writes in the IT Web Innovations web site on Professor quits Stanford to teach online. Professor Sebastian Thrun appears to have given up a good position at Stanford to teach on-line at Udacity.com. Udacity is a free online university with a mission to “change the future of education” - now there's a novel thought?

Image link to udacity.com.
Nevertheless - the idea of a university education being provided on-line with the best possible lecturers and content being available is a very appealing idea. Who would not like each module to be delivered by an expert in a particular field who is also an excellent teacher. Better that your average College lecturer (like me)?

According to Arendse, Professor Thrun had an audience of 160,000 for a class on Artificial Intelligence, making use of 2,000 volunteers to translate the class into different languages. As Arendse also states - "Thrun also proudly pointed out that he was teaching more students than all the students of Stanford.

Professor Thrun is a lucky guy who can give up such a prestigious position as a lecturer in Stanford University to do this - I envy him. I'd love to expand my own YouTube channel to do more on-line teaching. The trouble is, I am too scared to give up my own position to do so - Thrun must have some money behind him.

Anyway- I wish this venture well, and I confidently expect that this will be the third-level version of the Khan Academy. Watch out for Udacity!

1 comment:

  1. You would be a massive loss to NCI if you ever left Eugene. You are an excellent lecturer and truly one of the good guys.

    ReplyDelete