I paid over $1,000 for one of their “nanodegree” programs. After it ended, they had the nerve to lock all the content, including all my notes and submissions as well as course content like videos and such. I highly recommend anyone avoid them.
For courses, Udemy is hit or miss unfortunately. I wish there was an explicit way to tell before buying the course whether it allowed downloading the material (including the videos).
I was paying for another site monthly where there was an "inofficial" way to download videos. Stopped my subscription when they updated the site and downloading didn't work anymore
> As for Udacity, which was founded in 2011, it gave the usual kinds of statements a company makes when it gets acquired by a much larger organization like Accenture. That is, it believes that it can reach more people and help them acquire skills as part of the larger entity. That goes without saying, but there had been rumors earlier this year that the company was in talks with Indian edtech company Upgrad with an asking price of $80 million. Apparently that deal fell through and Accenture ended up buying them instead.
I wouldn't be shocked if it was low. I remember during the online learning boom of the mid-to-late 2010s I spent some time studying a variety of courses on Udacity but I felt the depth wasn't there.
And now there's a lot of different options for online learning specialized to particular industries that are superior to general platforms like Udacity. For example, when I was learning DL, I joined a local study group that went through fast.ai together.
There's a disruption coming. One of the clearest LLM use cases is in learning and development. Another one is in producing "first drafts" of documents based on past work and "best practices". Both areas are what Accenture (and Deloitte, etc) excel at.
It's also a major disruptor for their business model: if the effort spent on "first drafts" and simple analysis is made automatically by LLMs, then you dont need as many juniors; your employee base gets smaller. But then how do you get experts if you hire fewer (better even) juniors? big consulting Cos are pyramids and these pyramids need feeding, continuously.
I think this is a brilliant move: Accenture has tons of capability in L&D that they've built up for their own purposes --feeding the pyramid. It's a capacity that they can easily offer to enterprises as an additional service, and they will probably use a lot of LLMs to deliver it. OTOH, this also gives them optionality in upskilling people (pushing them up the pyramid) while maybe having a narrower pyramid base because of the LLM disruption.
Expect Deloitte and the others to follow. It's too good a play.
I am so grateful to Udacity and the CS 101 course. I had tried to learn programming at least three times using different resources. Each time I struggled with basic concepts and it seemed like I'd just never figure it out.
Then in 2012, I tried the CS 101 course and finally everything just fell into place. Obviously it just taught me the basics, but I came out of that course with the feeling that I could keep at it and make some really interesting stuff. The next two years were a really exciting time for me as I switched majors to CS and then got a paid internship in 2014 (from a post on Who's Hiring!). I've been working full-time since 2017 and I'm so happy that I was able to break into this industry.
It’s been so long that I’m on fuzzy on some details. I felt like the explanations of these concepts were really effective:
- basic data structures like maps and arrays
- encapsulating logic in functions and showing how you can compose them to do cool things. Recursion clicked for the first time.
The overarching project was to make a web crawler and I thought that was super interesting. Of course you’re making a toy version but there was enough substance there to keep me engaged. I still think web crawling is fascinating and made a crawler in rust a couple years ago (which was obviously still super basic by real standards).
I joined Udacity when the mission was "Double the world's GDP" and the best engineers and researchers flocked there to create great content. I loved the culture and the people. It was family in the truest sense. When I left the company, it had been hijacked by greedy and stupid MBAs running the show with a huge number of unwanted meetings, buzzword-filled marketing, sub-par content, and burning cash with random "data-driven" experiments.
People passionate about education and those with genuine ideas were sidelined and many were let go in multiple rounds of layoffs. It's so painful to see Udacity being bought by Accenture, another MBA/consultants-led shitshow.
The courses that were created until circa 2018 were amazing. Those created afterward were barely worth the time, let alone the money.
I hope someday the great folks will get back together and build another great learning platform again.
I share the same sentiment! I also worked at Udacity until 2018. Those were some of the most fun years of my professional life. It was sad seeing the original people leave and, with them, dedication to the original mission. I know some folks are still kicking around edtech ideas, so who knows? Maybe Udacity 2.0, once again focused on "Double the world's GDP," will pop up one day?
This is unfortunate to see. I remember when these alt-Ed startups were all the rage and there was a genuine belief that we were on the cusp of a paradigm shift in how we learned.
Would love to hear some success stories if anyone has any!
Learning has changed dramatically. There are incredible YouTube channels on every subject. Open courses are offered by top Universities for free.
What hasn't changed is credentialism. Because knowledge is free, everyone can claim to have it. So the value of a credential has gone up. An actual MIT degree vs classes taken at MIT OpenCourseware is orders of magnitude more significant.
You can learn anything for free now. Proving you've learned it is still heavily gate kept.
There have been huge changes, and where you do not need the credentials, or can get credentials separately from the courses, it has changed dramatically.
I have one a number of online courses, watched lectures that are put on Youtube, used material from university courses from their websites, and more. Some work related, some just for fun.
I do not think everyone has caught up with the changes, and the benefits for general education.
It is not just for adult, professional or university level education either. There has is a lot available for school level (to be clear in the British sense - primary school, secondary school/high school) education.
Schools have not (yet, I hope) changed although what some did during lockdown showed what could be done, but home educators have (at least to an extent): online courses, remote tuition, online materials are a huge advance on textbooks plus local classes or tutors. For example my daughter is doing an online course for history GCSE (UK exam taken at 16 in schools, roughly high school diploma level AFAIK), has a remote tutor for classical civilisation GCSE (and help with latin revision though she self taught that). The supervision for the observations for astronomy GCSE was done remotely too.
There is a lot of potential to do things differently, but change takes time. Systems have a lot of inertia in them.
There was sort of a naive belief that both credentialism and motivation could be solved if the material were out there. And, by and large, that wasn't true especially among the people who needed them the most.
There's a huge amount of material out there for people who want it. But it's most applicable to people who already have credentials in some form.
I actually got my break in tech through a program Accenture ran called the Veteran Technology Training Program. It was essentially a partnership with Udacity where they sponsored veterans through a 12 week Java course. At the conclusion of the training, they ran me through a series of interviews and extended a job offer. I ended up doing systems analysis work for them, which was a nice introduction to the field, especially considering my military occupation was infantry--not exactly tech-adjacent. After a few years of programming in my spare time and building up a portfolio, I got an opportunity at another company to do web dev, which I've been doing since.
I think it's pretty cool to see this acquisition happen. I can't speak for what Udacity has become since 2015 (when I went through the course), but it definitely benefited me.
Peter Norvig’s udacity class was probably the thing that made me employable when I was just getting started. Udacity in general was an amazing resource around 2012-14(+?) because it was very high quality and free. They had courses that would get you through an interview but also a decent amount that went deeper. I will always have good memories of them.
>> there was a genuine belief that we were on the cusp of a paradigm shift in how we learned
Why do you feel that belief has changed? I have used Khan Academy, Coursera, Udacity, OReilly Safari, and Udemy. All are great and each excels in different areas. Many have removed their all-access passes in the past year, but they all cost almost nothing compared to the alternatives. I could only have hoped for such awesome platforms existing when I was in high school or college.
For a sufficiently motivated learner, they are like rocket fuel for the mind. Their flexibility makes them great even for busy professionals.
They may be good resources but the energy in the air during that time was that they could challenge universities. It is clear with passed time that they didn't, and will not.
I completed the CompSci X-Series of MITx on edX, and Software Engineering for IaaS, from BerkeleyX. They were so awesome that I can only think they phased them out because it was such a bargain. Practically, the courses allowed me to change career and to be well positioned.
Well, you're probably at least sortof right. Once the bloom went off the MOOC rose, edX got sold off to an EdTech company. In general, universities decided that shoveling money and effort into the MOOC pit didn't do a lot to further their mission. MIT mostly continues OCW as sort of a sideline. I don't know how many resources actually go into it at this point.
Schools and colleges work because they enforce discipline first and foremost, and learning only secondarily. With online programs, if there is no discipline inherent in the student, which is the vast majority of people, there is no paradigm shift. Certainly, the best students will naturally learn, from any source, but that has been true historically.
Sounds sad, but I’ve subscribed to the belief that your degree doesn’t prove your knowledge. It proves you can go through certain obstacles, dedicate a few years of your life to something specific, which can be a redeemable factor during hiring. Basically an easy initial filtering method. Obviously there are an enormous number of exceptions, especially for specialized degrees.
Online education services will always have a hard time convincing the worth of their degrees to others. If people are taking those courses to just broaden their knowledge or learn something new, that’s great, I support that. But as a replacement for a degree from a physical university? Doubt it.
I learned a lot about cryptography in Stanford Cryptography I and II courses, and about machine learning in Andrew Ng course (but it was years ago so it's kind of useless now)
I then tried to learn compilers on something Standford has called LaGunita or whatever and it was closed while I was studying it (and it never worked properly). But I wouldn't finish that course anyway, compilers are hard.
> if the rumored $80 million price tag was correct, that was a precipitous drop in value for a company that raised almost $300 million, per PitchBook, and sported a $1 billion valuation in 2015
Readit News
For courses, Udemy is hit or miss unfortunately. I wish there was an explicit way to tell before buying the course whether it allowed downloading the material (including the videos).
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18601298
I wouldn't be shocked if it was low. I remember during the online learning boom of the mid-to-late 2010s I spent some time studying a variety of courses on Udacity but I felt the depth wasn't there.
And now there's a lot of different options for online learning specialized to particular industries that are superior to general platforms like Udacity. For example, when I was learning DL, I joined a local study group that went through fast.ai together.
It's also a major disruptor for their business model: if the effort spent on "first drafts" and simple analysis is made automatically by LLMs, then you dont need as many juniors; your employee base gets smaller. But then how do you get experts if you hire fewer (better even) juniors? big consulting Cos are pyramids and these pyramids need feeding, continuously.
I think this is a brilliant move: Accenture has tons of capability in L&D that they've built up for their own purposes --feeding the pyramid. It's a capacity that they can easily offer to enterprises as an additional service, and they will probably use a lot of LLMs to deliver it. OTOH, this also gives them optionality in upskilling people (pushing them up the pyramid) while maybe having a narrower pyramid base because of the LLM disruption.
Expect Deloitte and the others to follow. It's too good a play.
They’ll get on great with Accenture then!
Then in 2012, I tried the CS 101 course and finally everything just fell into place. Obviously it just taught me the basics, but I came out of that course with the feeling that I could keep at it and make some really interesting stuff. The next two years were a really exciting time for me as I switched majors to CS and then got a paid internship in 2014 (from a post on Who's Hiring!). I've been working full-time since 2017 and I'm so happy that I was able to break into this industry.
- basic data structures like maps and arrays
- encapsulating logic in functions and showing how you can compose them to do cool things. Recursion clicked for the first time.
The overarching project was to make a web crawler and I thought that was super interesting. Of course you’re making a toy version but there was enough substance there to keep me engaged. I still think web crawling is fascinating and made a crawler in rust a couple years ago (which was obviously still super basic by real standards).
People passionate about education and those with genuine ideas were sidelined and many were let go in multiple rounds of layoffs. It's so painful to see Udacity being bought by Accenture, another MBA/consultants-led shitshow.
The courses that were created until circa 2018 were amazing. Those created afterward were barely worth the time, let alone the money.
I hope someday the great folks will get back together and build another great learning platform again.
Usually when acquisitions are announced, there are congratulations and virtual high-fives filling the M&A channel...not today.
1: https://www.forbes.com/sites/dereknewton/2024/02/04/reported...
Would love to hear some success stories if anyone has any!
What hasn't changed is credentialism. Because knowledge is free, everyone can claim to have it. So the value of a credential has gone up. An actual MIT degree vs classes taken at MIT OpenCourseware is orders of magnitude more significant.
You can learn anything for free now. Proving you've learned it is still heavily gate kept.
I have one a number of online courses, watched lectures that are put on Youtube, used material from university courses from their websites, and more. Some work related, some just for fun.
I do not think everyone has caught up with the changes, and the benefits for general education.
It is not just for adult, professional or university level education either. There has is a lot available for school level (to be clear in the British sense - primary school, secondary school/high school) education.
Schools have not (yet, I hope) changed although what some did during lockdown showed what could be done, but home educators have (at least to an extent): online courses, remote tuition, online materials are a huge advance on textbooks plus local classes or tutors. For example my daughter is doing an online course for history GCSE (UK exam taken at 16 in schools, roughly high school diploma level AFAIK), has a remote tutor for classical civilisation GCSE (and help with latin revision though she self taught that). The supervision for the observations for astronomy GCSE was done remotely too.
There is a lot of potential to do things differently, but change takes time. Systems have a lot of inertia in them.
Most people are not autodidacts, so this would be a common perception even without the credentialism.
There's a huge amount of material out there for people who want it. But it's most applicable to people who already have credentials in some form.
I think it's pretty cool to see this acquisition happen. I can't speak for what Udacity has become since 2015 (when I went through the course), but it definitely benefited me.
I liked Steve Huffman’s web dev 101 class and was also a code reviewer at Udacity shortly after
Why do you feel that belief has changed? I have used Khan Academy, Coursera, Udacity, OReilly Safari, and Udemy. All are great and each excels in different areas. Many have removed their all-access passes in the past year, but they all cost almost nothing compared to the alternatives. I could only have hoped for such awesome platforms existing when I was in high school or college.
For a sufficiently motivated learner, they are like rocket fuel for the mind. Their flexibility makes them great even for busy professionals.
Online education services will always have a hard time convincing the worth of their degrees to others. If people are taking those courses to just broaden their knowledge or learn something new, that’s great, I support that. But as a replacement for a degree from a physical university? Doubt it.
I then tried to learn compilers on something Standford has called LaGunita or whatever and it was closed while I was studying it (and it never worked properly). But I wouldn't finish that course anyway, compilers are hard.
So investors lost money