[Alex3917]

The current Udacity exams take about 10 hours of coding to complete, so it sounds like these are actually going to be significantly less difficult. Still, I think this is a step in the right direction. Of all the online education programs out there my money is definitely on Udacity (or at least the Udacity model) to be the winner, and I think ten years from now people will recognize that this announcement was every bit as big as the X-prize or the recent SpaceX docking.

That's not to say there isn't room for other programs that are run in different ways, not only will there be but many will be insanely successful and profitable, but I think that the Udacity model is going to sort of the default way of doing things that every other program is compared against.

[lawnchair_larry]

You prefer Udacity to Coursera? I thought the opposite. Udacity has a small number of courses and they are focused on a specific project. Coursera mirrors a university course and tries to broadly cover the subject.

[Alex3917]

I haven't actually taken an Coursera courses yet. But I generally dislike traditional university courses and I hate Java, so I probably will avoid it until I run out of Udacity courses to take.

[mhurron]

What does Coursera and hating Java have to do with each other?

[Alex3917]

A bunch of their courses (including their algorithms courses) are in Java, which makes me skeptical of how good their taste is. It's a strong red flag that they're just licensing content without any understand of the actual content matter and the quality of what they're teaching. I could be wrong, but that's definitely the impression I get based on both the fact that they're using Java and the classes are structured like traditional university classes, since not only are most university classes really mediocre (at best), but it also shows that they aren't taking advantage of the power of the platform/medium. Again, another red flag for poor taste.

[lawnchair_larry]

Your reply is hilariously naive and insane. Have you even looked at it? It's Stanford professors, who also teach Stanford versions of the same courses.

Andrew Ng, director of Stanford's Artificial Intelligence lab, also the associate professor teaching "CS229: Machine Learning" and "CS221: AI" himself teaches the Coursera Machine Learning class.

Alex Aiken[1] teaches compilers. Tim Roughgarden[2][3] teaches the algorithms class.

And you are going to say they have poor taste and are just licensing content that they don't understand?

Java being one of Google's 3 official languages must be a red flag of their poor understanding and taste too I suppose :)

[1] http://theory.stanford.edu/~aiken/

[2] http://awards.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=4934147&srt=all&#3...

[3] http://soe.stanford.edu/research/surreal.htm

[alexott]

NLP class allows Java or Python - this is because they need to provide framework to perform auxiliary task, and students are required to fill only needed parts - specific algorithms, etc.

[guiambros]

Coursera is pretty language neutral. I did Algo I and used Python. Other students used C, C++, Java. And when I did Machine Learning the recommended language was Octave/Matlab (but you could use Python if you know what you're doing).

[huherto]

That is not true. I took the DAA class and you could choose your own language. I used Python.

[Alex3917]

Ahh good call. I'm pretty sure the course description used to say java, so maybe the changed it once the course started?

[drcube]

"The current Udacity exams take about 10 hours of coding to complete..."

From the article: " For the first round of exams, programming will not be included."

I don't think you can demonstrate programming competence with a 90 minute multiple choice test, so I'm interested to see how they end up tackling that challenge.

[jkimmel]

I think the idea would be for the Pearson exam to act as a compliment to verify your identity more so than demonstrate coding competence.

While the Udacity exam is the actual in depth proficiency challenge that employers will care about, the Pearson name gives some sort of assurance that this person did indeed pass a difficult coding related exam in a physical setting where we can verify their identity, reducing the likelihood that someone cheated or had someone else complete the Udacity course for them. The actual test questions might ask something like "How would you approach problem x, describe what language you would use and how you might structure a program," or for multiple choice, "Which of these is written using proper Python syntax" etc. If you have to learn enough to pass the Pearson test in the end, you'll still have to put in a large chunk of time, making cheating downright impractical.

End result, this partly addresses one of the fundamental issues with online learning that Sebastin Thrun has talked about before, providing a form of physical identity verification and association with an online student username. Of course, someone could always pull a bait-and-switch in the physical testing center, but that's a whole other ball game.

[mcguire]

"...students wishing to pursue our official credential and be part of our job placement program should also take an additional final exam in a Pearson testing center."

It sounds like the Pearson exams are in addition to the online, coding test.

[Alex3917]

Interesting, it's a little ambiguous as to whether they mean a second final exam or whether they mean in addition to the regular course. Assuming they mean a second final exam though this would be good as a clever checksum just to make sure you are who you say you are and can answer basic questions.

[stfu]

Learning for these kind of tests was always the most pointless tasks in school. It is just the same extreme-memorization, braindumping, completely forgetting about it pattern. But of cause this structure makes any kind of course super scalable.