Udacity Raises Funds From Andreessen Horowitz

Udacity will win by disintermediating HR, which I think is a great development. I really hate HR, because frankly - they suck - hard.<p>An example?<p>I can't remember which company this story was from (I think it was Lotus Software).<p>Basically the HR team of a multi-billion dollar startup were given the anonymised resumes of the first 10-20 founding team members.<p>HR rejected them all. Not one founding team member was accepted even for a short interview.<p>Tells you something about HR doesn't it?<p>First class universities are really great at bringing together smart people, money and difficult problems all into one area.<p>For the vast majority of non-smart people however it frankly just isn't worth it. The vast majority of jobs held by people from third and second tier universities do not need a degree - they just need to be qualified to do a specific job.<p>Udacity will stand in between second/third tier students and second/third tier business and match them like eBay does with buyers and sellers. This is worth a lot of money.

I think they stated the main point really well: “I don’t think this is about putting universities out of business. Educating millions of individuals, to me that’s a radical idea, but a positive radical idea.”<p>Most people taking these courses are not college-aged students. Universities continue to be valuable, but it's important to constantly renew your skill set and make this knowledge and resources accessible to as many people as possible.<p>I'm thrilled to see VC funding go into this. I've taken 1 Udacity and 1 Stanford course and both have been a great experience (although I prefer udacity). It might not help me get my next job, but the structure is excellent and definitely promotes more hands-on learning than I have seen in the classroom.

&#62;It started out matching students and employers — and has placed about 20 people in new jobs, total. But what really seems to be working is sponsored courses, Thrun said.<p>&#62;So, for instance, Google will offer an HTML5 game development course co-taught by two of its employees. HTML5 game development is a skill that’s useful in industry but not deeply academic, and something slow-moving universities are unlikely to offer for a while, Thrun noted.<p>I am really curious to see how this works out.<p>Does anyone know if udacity is modeling for a connected-learning experience? From the course requirements for the above course[1], it seems to be going this way:<p>&#62;Basic knowledge of HTML, Javascript, and how the web works is necessary for this course. There is an optional unit on HTML and Javascript to help get you up-to-speed. If you have a basic understanding of how the web is structured at the level of CS253: Web Application Engineering, you should be fine.<p>[1]<a href="http://www.udacity.com/overview/Course/cs255/CourseRev/1" rel="nofollow">http://www.udacity.com/overview/Course/cs255/CourseRev/1</a>

Honestly, Udacity seems to be losing it. It has only had 14 courses for a while, while Coursera has 200 courses, and counting. And the universities represented at Coursera have better recognition/ranking that at Udacity.<p>Why would somebody invest in Udacity now?

I took Sebastian's AI class at Stanford and signed up for more classes at Coursera (NLP, image processing). However, I think both of them lacking in student engagement and need building up additional infrastructure to keep student motivated. Self-pace study or self study requires a lot of discipline and a little bit of push via game mechanics, daily emails etc. can go a long way.<p>I think their metrics should not be just based on total signup or total classes offered but how many students graduate with high level competency. It's the total graduates and their skillsets that have HR value at the end.

What is Thrun's share on Udacity now?