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| Photo: Karin Kapsidelis |
So many students would never fit in a lecture hall in Charlottesville, nor be allowed in without paying, but that's no concern at Udacity, the digital university where Evans, an associate professor on leave from U.Va., is teaching.
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| Photo: David Evans |
The idea, he said, is to make "high-quality higher education available to people who wouldn't have the opportunity to come to U.Va., and that's the vast majority of the world."
Online courses and distance education are not new, but Udacity and other educational experiments like it are using technology to address the issue of access and affordability in a new way. Ivy League universities are embracing the concept — known as MOOCs, for massive open online courses — and making courses available for free on the Web.
A successful experiment by Stanford University last fall led to the creation of a social entrepreneurship company called Coursera, which offers free access to courses from Stanford; Princeton University; the University of California, Berkeley; the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor; and the University of Pennsylvania.
Harvard University has formed a partnership with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology called edX, a not-for-profit that will make courses available this fall.
Thrun, a Google fellow who led the company's self-driving car project, broke away and helped to establish Udacity as a for-profit startup. The courses are free to students, but the company charges a fee for testing to get certification and expects to make its profit from recruiters searching for skilled workers.
Evans said the company — whose name is derived from the word audacity — is focused now on developing courses, rather than bringing in revenue.
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Source: Richmond Times Dispatch
