Udacity

Founder / s: David Stavens, Sebastian Thrun, Mike Sokolsky
Key people: Sebastian Thrun (Co-Founder & President), Clarissa Shen (VP Strategic Business), Kathleen Mullaney (Vice President), Irene Au (Product and Design), Ryan C . Keenan (Curriculum Lead) and Zhalisa Clarke (Director of Business Development)
Employees: 101 – 250

They are building “University by Silicon Valley”, a new type of online university that: – teaches the actual programming skills that industry goals required today – undailed bird endorsed by agriculture, because they built them – provides education at a fraction of the cost and Time of traditional schools

With industry giants – Google, AT & T, Facebook, Salesforce, Cloudera, etc. -they offer Nanodegree credentials, designed to help become become Developers, Data Analysts, or Mobile Developers. Supported by their communities of coaches and students, their students learn Programming And data science through a series of online courses and hand-on projects that help them practice and build a convincing portfolio.

History

Udacity is the outgrowth of free computer science classes offered in 2011 through Stanford University. Thrun has stated he hopes half a million students will enroll, after an enrollment of 160,000 students in the predecessor course at Stanford, Introduction to Artificial Intelligence, and 90,000 students had Enrolled in the initial two classes as of March 2012. Udacity was published at the 2012 Digital Life Design conference.

Udacity is funded by venture capital firm, Charles River Ventures, and $ 200,000 of Thrun’s personal money. In October 2012 the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz led the investment of another $ 15 million in Udacity. In November 2013, Thrun announced in a Fast Company article that Udacity had a “lousy product” and that the service was pivoting to focus more on vocational courses for professionals And “nanodegrees.” As of 28 April 2014, Udacity has 1.6 million users in 12 full courses and 26 free courseware.

In 2014, the Georgia Institute of Technology launched the first “mass online open degree” in computer science by partnering with Udacity and AT & T; a complete master’s degree through that program costs students $ 7,000.