2008<\/strong> \u2013 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\u201d offered by Stephen Downes and George Siemens at the University of Manitoba.<\/span><\/p>\n 2011<\/strong> – Stanford University professor and Google executive Sebastian Thrun launched his free online course on artificial intelligence, attracting 160,000 students worldwide.<\/span><\/p>\n 2012 February<\/strong> \u2013 Thrun\u2019s Udacity was born.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n 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\u2019s model and Khan\u2019s 2011 TED talk<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u201cI 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, \u2018God damn it. I can do that\u2019.\u201d <\/em>(Thrun as cited in Handley, 2017)<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Thrun decided to start Udacity<\/a>, an organization that offers massive online courses to democratize education, to make education globally, universally available. It doesn\u2019t matter if one lives in Asia, or in South Africa, will get the same education everywhere.\u00a0Early days the company focused on teaching university degrees online, but the numbers decreased, and they decided to focus on lifelong learning and nanodegrees <\/a>instead of focusing on replacing colleges. This caused a significant shift in the future of education.<\/p>\n Useful links:<\/strong><\/p>\n The Thrun Lab Stanford<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 |\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0Thrun\u2019s Twitter<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0|\u00a0 \u00a0 TED Conversation with Thrun and Khan<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 |\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0Thrun\u2019s TED talks<\/a><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0057\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/99\/2018\/09\/thrun3.jpg\")
<\/a>Sebastian THRUN is the founder of the \u201csecretive\u201d research and development lab, Google X<\/a>. 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\u2019s most creative one (\u201cMost creative people – 5. Sebastian Thrun,\u201d 2011). But he gave it all up.<\/p>\n