Khan Academy. TED-Ed. MOOC MOOC. Coursera. Udacity - 21st Century University. Udacity artlcle. Udacity gives students videos that they can watch at their own pace and be continually quizzed on. This past August fellow Singularity Hub writer Aaron Saenz wrote about Udacity, the online university created by Stanford artificial intelligence professor and Google autonomous vehicle leader, Sebastian Thrun. At the time Thrun was gearing up to teach his Introduction to Artificial Intelligence course to a class of 200 at Stanford.
But why teach 200 when you can teach 1,000…or 160,000? With Udacity, Thrun and fellow AI giant Peter Norvig created an online version of the course, and anyone that wanted to enroll could – for free. The homework assignments and exams would be the same as the ones given to the Stanford students, and they would be graded in the same way so online enrollees could see how they stacked up to some of the brightest students in the world. Now, the semester’s over. Online, the course went viral. The flexibility that this format offers is immediately clear.