Sebastian Thrun of Stanford AI Class fame (you know – the largest class in human history with 160,000 participants) has just left his tenure track position to start an online education platform – Udacity. Here is an article about Udacity and here is the statement from the website: “We believe university-level education can be both high quality and low cost. Using the economics of the Internet, we’ve connected some of the greatest teachers to hundreds of thousands of students all over the world. ” In other words, the for-profits (i.e. University of Phoenix) as well as all of us at standard four year universities should be scared!
