Not the addressee but it's spectacular all around. There are a few classes that have a reputation for being poorly designed/maintained and a few with somewhat "unreasonable" time requirements (ie 50 hours a week for a single class). There are classes where you only interact with TAs/students (which is fine) and some where the professor is seemingly on a 24-hour modafinil drip, there to answer any question posed at any time.
For the most part it's intensive and immersive with enough learn-at-your-own-pace aspects to accommodate full-time jobs, families, hobbies, etc. I feel like I come away from every class like I've actually learned something that's embedded in me.
Udacity is what it is: a platform for watching videos with some minor ability to interact with coding examples / quizzes throughout. I have no issue with it, but agree that most of the meat of the courses come from other parts of the classes.
My hunch here, through Thrun's quotes and some in this, is that there were some aspects of CEO at this level that really didn't appeal to him. How many CEOs truly get to be personally creative in their position?
"There are a few classes that have a reputation for being poorly designed/maintained and a few with somewhat "unreasonable" time requirements (ie 50 hours a week for a single class)."
I've often wondered what on-campus students think of the program given there are a lot of competing elements to having both at an esteemed CS school. I've tried thinking about my undergrad days and how I'd feel if there were an equivalent program.
I was accepted to the program the year that the online masters was announced. At first, I was not amused.
However, I really really enjoyed my time actually being on campus. There were a few classes I took that would have been very difficult to do online, such as mobile & ubiq computing, where I got to spend quite a bit of time in the prototyping lab. I also had the chance to socialize a bit with professors and do some research with them. And personally, I don't do as well with online classes. I think it's really useful to have both kinds of programs. They're different experiences and they appeal to different people. Having both campus and online programs gives more opportunities to innovate in education.
I'm an OMSCS student. Udacity is fine. It serves its purpose. Sometimes it looks like the poor instructors are getting a double whammy of Georgia heat and hot spotlights, but the lectures are pretty high quality.
I'm not too far into the program, but the courses I've seen are built around readings, projects, and Piazza (a student forum for us to talk to each other in). Piazza is where most of the interesting stuff happens. For my class, there's the professor but also 5-10 TAs who are swarming Piazza at most hours of the day responding to questions. Once a week, there are office hours for a couple hours hosted on Hangouts. There's your normal midterm and final exam, but the courses seem very much structured around deadlines rather than mandatory participation week to week.
Here! Another OMSCS Student. I think, many of us associate ourselves with Georgia Tech than Udacity, even though we have some excellent staff who are full time employed by Udacity for our courses.
The technical infrastructure from Udacity is a low key here. But the partnership, enablement and opportunity in providing 1000s of qualified students to pursue masters is a phenomenal achievement.
Forever grateful to Udacity and Sebastian Thrun for this program.
For the most part it's intensive and immersive with enough learn-at-your-own-pace aspects to accommodate full-time jobs, families, hobbies, etc. I feel like I come away from every class like I've actually learned something that's embedded in me.
Udacity is what it is: a platform for watching videos with some minor ability to interact with coding examples / quizzes throughout. I have no issue with it, but agree that most of the meat of the courses come from other parts of the classes.
My hunch here, through Thrun's quotes and some in this, is that there were some aspects of CEO at this level that really didn't appeal to him. How many CEOs truly get to be personally creative in their position?