The Difference Between Udacity And Other Online Education Startups

Recently I’ve enrolled in a number of free courses at Udacity. Udacity is an online university that aims to bring free quality education to millions of people around the world. It’s something that greatly excites me and I believe that the change these online education startups are bringing about is nothing short of revolutionary.

Having tried out a number of courses from various sources including MIT OCW, Coursera, I believe that the method of teaching employed by Udacity is superior to those offered by other online universities. Most arguments comparing these (particularly Udacity and Coursera) involve their styles of teaching - Udacity’s shorter videos of a few minutes each with multiple quizzes along the way versus Coursera’s slightly more traditional method with longer videos including lecture slides and an occasional quiz.

However, that’s not what I’m going to discuss today. You can find a lot of discussion regarding that on numerous websites. I’m going to talk about why Udacity has the upper-hand because of the goal of each of the courses.

If you’ve visited Hacker News or Reddit’s r/learnprogramming subreddit, you’ll find a common theme in the advice given by the people over there: Build something. You’re always going to learn something new. That is a process that’s never going to stop. Books and other great learning resources are going to keep popping up. But at some point you need to stop reading that ‘Really Advanced C++’ book. You can only learn so much by reading. It’s when you start building something that you really understand how much you know. You also learn so many things that no book can explain to you. And this is where Udacity has the upper-hand. It gets you to build things.

If you watch the introductory videos for the courses that Udacity has to offer, you’ll see that each of the course has a goal that involves you building something - CS 101: Building A Search Engine, CS 253: Build Your Own Blog, CS 262: Create Your Own Web Browser. Is CS 101 going to have you building your own competitor to DuckDuckGo, Bing or Google in 7 weeks? Probably not. A replacement for Chrome via 262? Unlikely. The next Blogspot with 253? Who knows. But, what they are getting their students to do is go about the learning process while working on something larger. Who can blame students of getting bored of CS when the only way they’re taught to use for-loops is to display numbers and patterns? But displaying results from your very own search engine? Now that sounds like something they’d be keen to work on. Udacity’s CS 101 covers all the traditional things an introductory CS course should offer. However, it does that and so much more. Knowing that your 7 weeks of learning will actually result in a final product is something that excites every student. And this is why Udacity’s teaching model is, in my opinion, perfectly suited for the medium.

This post isn’t meant to bash Coursera or any of the other online universities. In fact, I was enrolled in Coursera’s Game Theory class and I really enjoyed it. Furthermore, I understand that some people may prefer the more traditional approach of teaching, and that’s perfectly fine. This post is just a personal opinion on the matter.

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