2006 – The term Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) had not been coined by David Cormier yet, but HASTAC offered a course with 100,000 online registrants. It was massive, open, online . . . and connectivist.
2008 – The open teaching got a new name: Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC). MOOC began in Canada; a course on learning theory called “Connectivism and Connective Knowledge” offered by Stephen Downes and George Siemens at the University of Manitoba.
2011 – Stanford University professor and Google executive Sebastian Thrun launched his free online course on artificial intelligence, attracting 160,000 students worldwide.
2012 February – Thrun’s Udacity was born.
Sebastian THRUN is the founder of the “secretive” research and development lab, Google X. His role was to come up with life-changing ideas, like a car that drives itself or Google Street View. He is probably one of the cleverest people in the world, but he was definitely called one of the world’s most creative one (“Most creative people – 5. Sebastian Thrun,” 2011). But he gave it all up.
Thrun left Google X because his humanitarian vision was even more significant than what he felt he could do there. He took inspiration from Salman Khan’s model and Khan’s 2011 TED talk, and he did his part of redesigning higher education, first via his computer science class at Stanford. Thrun pushed his artificial intelligence class online, and out of the 160,000 students who ended up taking it, 23,000 graduated.
“I listened to a young fellow named Sal Khan who started (the) Khan Academy. He was, like, an investment banker, had no teaching credentials. But his videos teaching just went viral. He had, like, tens of millions of students. And I was sitting at Stanford with my typical class of, like, 50 and thinking, ‘God damn it. I can do that’.” (Thrun as cited in Handley, 2017)
Thrun decided to start Udacity, an organization that offers massive online courses to democratize education, to make education globally, universally available. It doesn’t matter if one lives in Asia, or in South Africa, will get the same education everywhere. Early days the company focused on teaching university degrees online, but the numbers decreased, and they decided to focus on lifelong learning and nanodegrees instead of focusing on replacing colleges. This caused a significant shift in the future of education.
Useful links:
The Thrun Lab Stanford | Thrun’s Twitter | TED Conversation with Thrun and Khan | Thrun’s TED talks
If you wish to read more about Salman Khan, please visit Christy’s Blog.
Illustrations are created by the author.
Photo Credit: Udacity, Sebastian Thrun, co-founder of Udacity – used for educational purposes only
References
A brief history of MOOCs | MAUT – McGill University. (n.d.). Retrieved September 13, 2018, from https://www.mcgill.ca/maut/current-issues/moocs/history
Davidson, C. (2013). What was the first MOOC? | HASTAC. Retrieved September 14, 2018, from https://www.hastac.org/blogs/cathy-davidson/2013/09/27/what-was-first-mooc
Dillahaunt, T., Wang, Z., Teasley, S. D. (2014). Democratizing higher education: Exploring MOOC use among those who cannot A…: EBSCOhost. The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 15(5). Retrieved from http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/1841/3070
Handley, L. (2017). Google X founder Sebastian Thrun: Why I gave up 97 percent of my salary to try to change the world. Retrieved September 14, 2018, from https://www.cnbc.com/2017/06/01/sebastian-thrun-udacity-googlex.html
Metz, R. (2013). Sebastian Thrun on the future of learning – MIT Technology Review. Retrieved September 13, 2018, from https://www.technologyreview.com/s/517181/sebastian-thrun-on-the-future-of-learning/
Most creative people – 5. Sebastian Thrun. (2011). Retrieved September 15, 2018, from https://www.fastcompany.com/3018411/5-sebastian-thrun