Udacity announced yesterday that it is selling itself to Accenture.
Although I left Udacity three years ago, it looms large in my career. In 2016, Sebastian Thrun recruited me to join his start-up and build the Self-Driving Car Engineer Nanodegree, which wound up teaching tens of thousands of students to work on autonomous vehicles. I led the Nanodegree, and the team the built it, which was the highlight of my career.
2017, in particular, was Udacity’s biggest year. Several other Nanodegrees followed fast on the heels of the self-driving car program, leading the company to rocket ship growth.
The subsequent years had ups and downs, but Udacity always had the best instructional model of any educational enterprise I’ve ever tried.
And that pedagogical success really stemmed from Sebastian. He is the best teacher I’ve ever known – charismatic, but humble enough to realize that students don’t learn from listening to him. Students learn by doing, which was part of Udacity from Day 1. Hands-on quizzes, exercises, and projects, and then feedback on those projects from trained reviewers, are the core of what made Udacity so great at teaching.
I texted Sebastian yesterday to congratulate him on this milestone in Udacity’s journey, and to thank him for recruiting me there, all those years ago.
He texted back and reminded me that my Nanodegree is still out there, along with all the other courses and programs I taught at Udacity, and that people are still learning from me. I hope they keep on learning 🙂
David Silver 