I am a really impatient person who wants to see many issues fixed with solutions that don't yet exist.
— Sebastian Thrun
We're now at this place where we can make the evolution of academic content match the evolution of the world.
I was a popular professor. My teaching ratings were usually good. I could take complicated subjects and explain them in an entertaining way.
With any new medium, the full power is only unearthed with experimentation.
Many of us are inspired and are eager to get things done. But once too many people are involved, life becomes complicated. We are all social beings, so we have an innate urge to incorporate everyone's thoughts.
Elite colleges like Stanford are extremely inaccessible. They're failing in their mission to provide access.
Top notch Indian employers such as Flipkart have hired Udacity Nanodegree graduates based solely on their performance in our programme, without any in-person interview.
This is the age of disruption.
I like to put myself in the most uncomfortable position.
I feel like everyone has this competitive instinct.
I believe e-courses will eventually change people's attitude toward learning. Education will play an increasingly dominant role in people's lives. For people of all ages and all geographies.
Online education that leaves almost everybody behind except for highly motivated students, to me, can't be a viable path to education.
Honestly, the average American spends about 52 minutes a day in commute traffic. And as much as I love driving my car and many people like driving their car, commuting has never been fun for me.
Most rules that you think are written in stone are just societal. You can change the game and really reach for the stars and make the world a better place.
We need to make education so much fun that students can't help but learn.
I really believe that we have to work hard to make online education better and better, and eventually it's going to be really great. But like most of these things, it takes time to improve, to understand and to make things really good.
We don't look at problems logically, we look at them emotionally. We look at them through the guts. We look at them as if we're doing a high school problem, like what is beautiful, what makes me recognized among my peers. We don't go and think about things. We, as a society, don't wish to engage in rational thought.
We're often too entrenched in existing structures and are so primed to think that if we grew up with the values and the norms, they have to be correct.
I love to throw myself into situations where I don't understand everything yet.
The individualization of learning fundamentally redefines the role of assessment.
In the field of higher ed, many have asked whether (or when) digital education will replace on-campus education. I wonder the opposite. Cinema never replaced theatre. TV didn't replace radio. I wonder how different digital education will be from classrooms, and where it will lead us.
Horizontal meetings are team or project meetings, set up to coordinate individual activities. When I worked in a large tech company, those meetings just popped up in my calendar by the dozen.
I literally worked at research labs where the staff really tried to steer management away from the modern technology that was actually better.
The idea of 'interview-less hiring' is new and a trend we will see in the changing global job market.
I can give my love of learning to other people.
You can learn for your own sake, and that's fine, but if you come to Udacity, you learn because you want someone else to understand what you learned.
I'd aspired to give people a profound education - to teach them something substantial. But the data was at odds with this idea.
I don't think we will put higher-ed out of business. I think we'll evolve it. More access, higher quality, lower costs, more global reach.
I care about education for everyone, not just the elite.
If we could do away with traffic accidents, that'd be wonderful. There'd be more than a million people saved every year on this planet.
You can't change the world without a certain amount of healthy willingness to break the rules.
If we study learning as a data science, we can reverse engineer the human brain and tailor learning techniques to maximize the chances of student success. This is the biggest revolution that could happen in education, turning it into a data-driven science, and not such a medieval set of rumors professors tend to carry on.
I'd really love to see a business model for higher education going forward that is actually affordable, that uses modern technology to reach scale and quality and that really reimburses the services rendered in a way that's meaningful to everybody.
Technology is synonymous for connection with other people.
Larry Page, co-founder of Google, is an unbelievable big thinker, and there was a saying in Google that if you wanted to know the future, go to Larry.
You don't lose weight by watching someone else exercise. You don't learn by watching someone else solve problems. It became clear to me that the only way to do online learning effectively is to have students solve problems.
Many students learn best by doing. But because classrooms force the same pace on all students, they limit the degree to which students can truly learn through trial and error. Instead, lectures still force many students to follow material passively and in lockstep pace.
There is a simple fix to our excessive meeting culture, but it is not easy to implement. It's one of these things that are easy to say but hard to do. The fix is: abandon all recurring meetings. I am serious. All!
Corporate America is drowning in meetings. To make one thing clear, I am not against communication. Quick one-on-ones can be extremely effective. I am talking about those hour-long recurring meetings, devoid of a clear agenda, and attended by many. I dread them.
I have learned, if you give a team a budget, then the team tries to maximise the budget so that they get the same next year.
You could get an entire computer science education for free right now.
What I see is democratizing education will change everything.
Innovation means change.
In most parts of the world, starting a company that goes bust is dubbed a 'failure.' In Silicon Valley, we call this 'gaining experience.' We are willing to take the risks that are inherent for innovation.
I feel every technology can be abused, but fundamentally we put new technologies into the service of humanity.
Few ideas work on the first try. Iteration is key to innovation.
If you look at the ability of a self-driving car to stay in the lane and not to speed and keep a good distance to the car in front of you, it actually does better than me.
I find it amazingly easy to take something, if you really believe in it, and turn it to reality.
Education used to be a slice of life, something you did as a child through college, and then spent the rest of your life working, and then death. Everything is about to change. I believe education will become something that fits seamlessly into life, and we will take big clunky things like degrees and college and fit them into a weekend.
Giving education away for free is a really good idea, but it can't be the future of education. There has to be a business model around it that actually works.
