Does Online Education work? Some thoughts

I’m one of those happy guys who participated in the legendary 2011 Stanford MOOC, Introduction to Artificial Intelligence. That course made me (and thousands of students around the world) discover a whole different and revolutionary method of learning.

I think today there is no question that Online Education works, but sometimes the question still comes up, is it enough to just learn online? I think it depends heavily on the subject, CS happens to be particularly well suited for self and online education.

I did a little throwback today by watching this talk from Sebastian Thrun where he mentions how online students from the AI course compared to actual Stanford students.

• 75.5% college students preferred the speed of learning of the Udacity class rather than the traditional class.
• 411 of the best online students were better than all Stanford students of the same class.

Udacity nowadays is at a whole new level of teaching. I particularly like the nano degrees. They really go into a lot of depth and make you job ready. Right now I’m taking the Deep Learning Nanodegree. I’ve observed Udacity and taken several courses over the years and it is doing better and better. Thanks, Sebastian!

Originally published at Karlbooklover.