One of the key thematic questions the Center for 21st Century Universities has been exploring is, "Can an elite curriculum be open, and accessible and still maintain quality and rigor?" If Sebastian Thrun’s Udacity initiative is indicative, it would seem that this is indeed possible.

Google Fellow and Stanford Research Professor Sebastian Thrun created the education startup-turned-University Udacity with colleague Peter Norvig to teach their Fall 2011 open course on Artificial Intelligence. After sending only one email soliciting students from outside the university, the 200 Stanford students registered for the class were joined by nearly 158,000 learners from around the globe. Both on-campus and virtual students watched the same two 75-minute lectures per week and took the same weekly graded homework assignments and quizzes. Stanford students also had the option of attending class lectures where they were able to ask questions and discuss ideas with the professor. The cost of this face-to-face luxury? $3560 in Stanford tuition, resulting in credit toward a Stanford degree. The other 158,000 students paid nothing and received a letter from Dr. Thrun verifying their successful completion of the course.

Thrun recounted this career-altering experience with the Artificial Intelligence course at the Digital Life, Design conference. His speech recalled compelling stories from students and the lengths they went to attend this class. Included was an email from a student in Afghanistan who risked his life to reach a Wi-Fi hotspot in order to complete class assignments. He further noted that there were more students in this online class from the small country of Lithuania than all of Stanford’s other courses combined. Volunteers translated the lectures into 44 languages, so the course could reach more people. Interestingly enough, in-class attendance in the artificial intelligence class dwindled from 200 at the start of the class to 30 by the end of it. Thrun attributes this decline to the robust online community that built up around this course. At the end of the semester 245 students received perfect scores on all of their assignments--none of them were Stanford students. After this experience, Thrun concluded, “I can’t teach at Stanford again” focusing instead on Udacity. He subsequently resigned his tenured position, remaining a research professor at Stanford.

Inspired by the Khan Academy model, Udacity classes emphasize repeating a skill or problem type until the skill has been mastered, instead of creating challenging courses and allowing students to fail, as is the case in many university “weeder” courses. The first Udacity class “Introduction to Search Engines” taught by David Evans promised to teach someone with no programming skills how to build a working search engine in just seven weeks.

Educational innovations, like Udacity, offer the potential to fundamentally change the way in which students interact with their educational experience, engaging with the material until they have mastered it, instead of moving on to the next topic with incomplete knowledge of foundational material. It also offers a different model for how professors can interact with their students; Thrun recounts how a student told him they felt as if they were being personally tutored via video in a class of 160,000 students. Perhaps the greatest innovative impact is in the way in which education is validated and credentialed. It is quite difficult to argue that Thrun is unqualified to offer such a credential, as his instruction and evaluation was certainly adequate when packaged with a Stanford degree. The impact of these letters of completion suggests a fundamentally different way of discerning competence. The aggregation of the changes: structure and delivery of material, open participation, and non institutional evaluation of competence, represents an exciting, innovative approach to rethinking the nature and practice of higher education.