How Udacity transformed professional education into technology
Professional education, the acquisition of new skills, the incorporation of knowledge and courses to your curriculum is no longer the prerogative of professionals willing to enroll in an MBA. This also includes acquiring skills for the future, especially those focused on the technology area, among other knowledge that is no longer being transmitted exclusively on an academic basis.
There is no way. The way we understand education has definitely changed and the diploma should become less and less important in the coming years for many people.
Certainly, Udacity has been a key player in shaping this new world of digital learning. The company combines the concept of massively open online courses (MOOCs) and the need to offer knowledge and expertise for the labor market. Solving this issue, the edtech has a valuation that, according to Craft, is in the region of $1.1 billion USD.
What is so special about it? I decided to write this article to tell a little of this story and show what we have to learn from it to build an even more robust edtech ecosystem in the country.
One talk, one idea
In June 2011, Sebastian Thurn, David Stevens and Mike Sokolsky, the founders of Udacity, were at a TED event with Salman Khan, founder of Khan Academy. In the talk, Khan talked about his venture’s efforts to offer knowledge expansions via the Internet, for elementary and higher education students.
Thurn, Stevens, and Sokolsky had gone to that TED to give a talk about their venture at the time: the future of autopilot cars. At the time, Thurn was not an entrepreneur, but a Stanford University professor of Artificial Intelligence. Only upon hearing Khan, the first of the group had an insight: if the future is technological and Artificial Intelligence is increasingly present in our lives, why not offer an AI training course via the Internet?
Immediately, he approached Peter Norvig, Google’s director of research and also a professor at Stanford, to set up an Intro to AI course for anyone with the internet. He invested $300,000 out of his own pocket and convinced his two TED fellows to join him. Stevens would be the CEO of the company and Sokolsky would be the CTO. At the time, the name adopted was KnowLabs.
By March 2012, 100,000 students were enrolled in the company’s course that was then called KnowLabs. In the same month, two other courses were added: Programming a Robotic Car and Building a Search Engine. With the addition of these two new pieces, the company went by the name we know it by today.
Since the beginning, this has been one of Udacity’s differentials: its association with leading companies that offer their know-how for the creation of courses. There are associations with Intel, Facebook, AT&T, among other large organizations that offer cutting-edge knowledge so that it can become fuel for new transformations. And this approach of companies with Udacity is perfectly understandable: according to statistics, 79% of CEOs fear that the lack of digital skills can be detrimental to the future of their companies, and 61% believe that these skills can be quickly acquired by employees. This makes Udacity’s nanograduation system strategic to fill this gap seen by market leaders.
Nano format, macro knowledge
But how is this knowledge passed on? One of the most interesting things about Udacity is their format. They offer “nanodegrees” that cover specific knowledge topics, completed with capstone projects. In general, Udacity courses are modeled on a problem-oriented/project-based methodology. In this way, the content passed through the courses is made highly applicable and practical. All this with technical support from mentors and career coaches available during the course activities.
As Thurn, the company’s current CEO, said on signing a partnership with Bertelsmann: “The demand for professionals with IT skills and digital expertise is growing in companies around the world. Our goal] is to democratize access to education for all.
Udacity’s model and success in providing issue-oriented content, with broad accessibility and based on partnerships with leading companies, shows that it is possible to think about quality web-based education. Its value is evidence that it is useful to think in terms of expanding online education to all flanks of teaching and learning. Moreover, I consider that this educational format is strategic to overcome the training gaps in formal education, which has not yet had its mentality transformed enough to include emerging technologies and knowledge such as Data Science, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Cloud, among others, in the educational package provided to new professionals. Thus, not only do these employees gain a new set of useful knowledge, but also one that is quickly applicable in their daily journey.
In Brazil, the challenges are obviously not limited to the corporate world. We have a technical education that has a lot to gain from the creation of new solutions and tools, including with real social impacts, for the qualification of a workforce that is still very dependent on public institutions and large investments. Other sectors of education also have their particular pains that can be addressed by creative solutions.
I had the opportunity to do several “nanograduations” at Udacity in the last few years as a way to ground my knowledge before facing new challenges, and recently I decided to venture into the area of Artificial Intelligence, a knowledge that I hope in the future to be able to bring in more practical applications to the education sector. I need to recognize that being guided on the knowledge acquisition journey by other market professionals who are or have been in situations similar to mine is a great motivator to keep learning there.
After all, if Udacity’s model generates value for the companies that benefit from employees trained by it, why wouldn’t society benefit from students trained in a similar model?
