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Udacity Says It Can Teach Tech Skills to Millions, and Fast
"I'k the least experienced person on my technology team at Google," Kelly Marchisio, a 25-year-former estimator programmer, told me recently. "I bluntly might be ane of the least experienced engineers at Google, period."
Ms. Marchisio was not assuming false modesty. Like many Googlers, she has an enviable academic background, including a master'south degree from Harvard. Only her degree, from Harvard'due south Graduate School of Didactics, had to do with the interactions between neuroscience and teaching, a field far removed from software engineering. In 2013, Google hired Ms. Marchisio as a customer service representative, a task that paid the bills simply failed to ignite her intellectual passions.
What she really wanted to do was code. Ms. Marchisio had taken several calculator science classes at Harvard, sparking her involvement in programming — which happens to exist 1 of the economic system'due south nigh in-demand skills. But how does someone with a chief's in pedagogy move from customer service to coding as an occupation?
"I'm superexcited with efforts to go girls and young people into coding, only for a long time I've thought, 'What virtually me?' " Ms. Marchisio said. "I'm here at present, I'one thousand already in the work forcefulness. You tin have me tomorrow if you lot just train me."
Economists and technologists concur that in the hereafter, merely about anybody's job will involve more technology. During the last few years, many local and online schools take popped up to teach people how to code. They offer a vast range of prices and techniques. Some, like Codecademy, are gratis, while others can toll thousands or fifty-fifty tens of thousands of dollars. Some offer more personalized coaching, while others exit students to figure things out on their own.
Now Udacity, a four-twelvemonth-old online teaching start-upwards, believes that afterwards years of trial and fault, information technology has hit on a model of vocational training that tin be scaled up to teach millions of people technical skills. Udacity's founder, Sebastian Thrun, a specialist in bogus intelligence at Stanford University who once ran Google X, the search company's advanced projects division, said that the "nanodegree" program that the firm created terminal twelvemonth volition result in vastly lower education costs and wider accessibility. Early information suggests the plan is efficient and reliably results in new jobs — including for Ms. Marchisio, who began working equally a software programmer at Google subsequently taking Udacity's "total-stack developer" course this spring.
The nanodegree works like this: Last year, Udacity partnered with technology companies to create online courses geared toward education a prepare of discrete, highly prized technical skills — including mobile programming, data analysis and web evolution. Students who complete these courses are awarded the nanodegree, a credential that Udacity has worked with Google, AT&T and other companies to turn into a new grade of workplace certification.
"We tin can't plough yous into a Nobel laureate," Mr. Thrun told me. "But what we can exercise is something similar upskilling — yous're a smart person, simply the skills yous accept are inadequate for the current job market, or don't allow you become the job yous aspire to have. We can help you get those skills."
If predictions about the potential for technology to essentially improve instruction smell to you lot like Silicon Valley peyote, I don't blame you. Computers have long been held upwards as a magic bullet for learning, and they've constantly failed to evangelize; higher pedagogy has just get more expensive and less accessible alongside the rise of digital technology.
Udacity itself has been beached on the shores of unrealized optimism. In 2011, later discovering wide interest in online learning when he put his Stanford bogus-intelligence lectures online, Mr. Thrun founded Udacity as one of the first for-profit MOOCs — for "massive open online courses." The idea that MOOCs would pose an existential threat to the elite universities gained cultural cachet. "Null has more than potential to lift more than people out of poverty," Thomas L. Friedman, the New York Times columnist, wrote in 2013.
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Actually, that didn't happen. Mr. Thrun now says that in its offset incarnation as a MOOC that tried to offer students a broad, general-purpose education, Udacity attracted many people to its classes, merely just well-nigh everyone failed to complete the work. So in 2013, Mr. Thrun began reimagining Udacity not as a replacement to universities, only as a more practical vocational school that offered highly structured lessons to assist people find jobs.
In an economy constantly riven by technological change, Mr. Thrun says he believes periodic vocational preparation will get increasingly important in the job market. "Information technology's a error to think that a unmarried college instruction can bear you for a lifetime," he said. "To continue pace with change, your didactics has to exist done throughout your life."
Then far, Udacity'southward new model shows a glimmer of success. A twelvemonth afterward the plan'south commencement, the company has 10,000 students enrolled in its nanodegree courses, and the number is growing by a third every month. Udacity charges $200 a month for the courses (students tin can have as footling or as much time as they want to end). When they successfully consummate a course, Udacity gives dorsum one-half the tuition. The company says that a typical student volition earn a nanodegree in about five months — in other words, for effectually $500.
Because students take several months or longer to complete their degrees, it is too soon to tell exactly how many will cease. Then far, Udacity estimates the graduation charge per unit to be about 25 percentage. Thousands of workers have earned degrees, and hundreds take found new jobs as a result.
Mr. Thrun attributes part of the success to the course fabric, which was adult in conjunction with companies to teach skills that they look for in employees. For case, Udacity's Android course is staffed by instructors from Google, which adult the mobile operating system. Udacity's model too a puts a premium on i-on-one coaching, mentorship, career counseling and chore-interviewing skills, all of which go along students more invested in their work.
The absence of man interaction has long bedeviled online education, but Mr. Thrun has found a mode to offer personalized teaching systems on a broad scale while keeping costs low. He does so using a proven Cyberspace trick — online outsourcing. Udacity has a network of paid graders across the world who are well versed in each of its courses; when students submit their projects, one of these graders picks up the work and quickly assesses it, including detailed comments virtually the student's progress. The graders can earn $50 to $100 an hr.
"With what I earned last month, I tin take a trip to Europe," Aparna Sridhar, a Udacity grader in Chennai, India, told me.
Despite these costs, Mr. Thrun said Udacity achieved profitability in July. He said the start-up had since decided to push button its profits back into developing more coursework. Udacity raised $35 meg from investors terminal year, and it now has about 150 employees, he said.
I spoke to several students who described Udacity every bit life-changing. I was Dan Haddigan, 28, who graduated from art school with a degree in printmaking and worked for several years at an art gallery in Philadelphia. Final year, he contemplated going back to graduate school for art but heard nearly Udacity and decided coding was more practical. The nanodegree was challenging. For several months, he said, "I would wake upwardly, work on projects for Udacity, go to work at the gallery, come home, then try to get more piece of work on my projects." The course — in web development — took about five months, costing him $500. But Mr. Haddigan said the work proved rewarding. Subsequently finishing his degree, he found a list for a task at IntuitSolutions, a spider web development agency.
He hesitated in applying. "I idea, who am I?," he said. "I just took an online course and I'm applying for these full-time jobs. They're going to laugh me out of the interview."
They didn't. He got the job.
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Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/17/technology/udacity-says-it-can-teach-tech-skills-to-millions.html
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