Tenured Professor Departs Stanford U., Hoping to Teach 500,000 Students at Online Start-Up - Wired Campus - The Chronicle of Higher Education

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Tenured Professor Departs Stanford U., Hoping to Teach 500,000 Students at Online Start-Up - Wired Campus - The Chronicle of Higher Education

via chronicle.com

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A Stanford University professor who taught an online artificial intelligence course to more than 160,000 students leaves his tenured position to aim for an even bigger audience.

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Leaving a tenured position at a top university like Stanford is no small decision. This is and will be discussed by deans and is a significant harbinger of things to come in higher education.

Excerpted:
The Stanford University professor who taught an online artificial intelligence course to more than 160,000 students has abandoned his tenured position to aim for an even bigger audience.

Sebastian Thrun, a professor of computer science at Stanford, revealed today that he has departed the institution to found Udacity, a start-up offering low-cost online classes. He made the surprising announcement during a presentation at the Digital – Life – Design conference in Munich, Germany. The development was first reported earlier today by Reuters.

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...many of the 200 Stanford students taking the course in the classroom flocked to the videos because they could absorb the lectures at their own pace.

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...Despite the low production quality, many of the 200 Stanford students taking the course in the classroom flocked to the videos because they could absorb the lectures at their own pace.

...The course’s popularity exploded online, drawing students from around the world. The experience taught the professor that he could craft a course with the interactive tools of the Web that recreated the intimacy of one-on-one tutoring, he said.

Mr. Thrun told the crowd his move was motivated in part by teaching practices that evolved too slowly to be effective.

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...[university] teaching practices ...evolved too slowly to be effective.

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During the era when universities were born, “the lecture was the most effective way to convey information. We had the industrialization, we had the invention of celluloid, of digitial media, and, miraculously, professors today teach exactly the same way they taught a thousand years ago,” he said.

He concluded by telling the crowd that he couldn’t continue teaching in a traditional setting. “Having done this, I can’t teach at Stanford again,” he said.

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Tags » 2012 access change changemanagement digital disruptors e-learning education higher highereducation innovation learning technology video
- 24 January 2012
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Tenured Professor Departs Stanford U., Hoping to Teach 500,000 Students at Online Start-Up - Wired Campus - The Chronicle of Higher Education

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