Ask HN: Whatever Happened to Udacity?
Udacity is an education company which, according to Wikipedia, is even a year older than Coursera or EdX. Its golden years seem to be around 2014-2015, when it produced a lot of great content, including courses by developers from Google (I particularly remember a PWA course released around 2015, and a course on web accessibility; a course on computer graphics was great as well), or professors from Georgia Tech. Then it all seemed to stop. Udacity still exists as a company; but it hasn't released any more exciting free courses since then. What happened? Both in 2015, when it looked like top educators were happy to partner with it and create content for it; and afterwards, when it all stopped? Does anyone here know their story?
16 comments
I used to work for Udacity and in a non-IC role. I worked there during the major layoffs and restructuring of the company.
What I will say is the company and management are very mission driven (I have never worked with people prior to Udacity that were honestly driven like that.. they truly wanted to educate the world and make education accessible to everyone).
With that being said, from a financial perspective the company was having a hard time. Key revenue was from enterprise partnerships and upskilling workers in companies. There was a partnership with Google that got cut (back stabbed) at the last minute as Google announced a competing service (Google Certificates, Grow with Google, etc). It was supposed to be Udacity's certificates.
The company had to shift focus on generating revenue and cutting costs to stay alive... a lot of free courses and new ideas were axed. A focus on smaller/higher quality content, more nanodegrees, a "subscription" based certificate instead of a one time fee/forever access, etc. Most importantly, a focus on enterprise upskilling activities (helping companies train their employees to retain/re-hire their employees).
What I will say is the company and management are very mission driven (I have never worked with people prior to Udacity that were honestly driven like that.. they truly wanted to educate the world and make education accessible to everyone).
With that being said, from a financial perspective the company was having a hard time. Key revenue was from enterprise partnerships and upskilling workers in companies. There was a partnership with Google that got cut (back stabbed) at the last minute as Google announced a competing service (Google Certificates, Grow with Google, etc). It was supposed to be Udacity's certificates.
The company had to shift focus on generating revenue and cutting costs to stay alive... a lot of free courses and new ideas were axed. A focus on smaller/higher quality content, more nanodegrees, a "subscription" based certificate instead of a one time fee/forever access, etc. Most importantly, a focus on enterprise upskilling activities (helping companies train their employees to retain/re-hire their employees).
So Google back stabbed yet another company…
Time for a crackdown on the monopoly.
Where’s the US government?
Where’re the EU governments?
Georgia Tech's OMSCS master's degree program used to use Udacity for all of its lecture videos. I personally liked Udacity. A couple years ago, Georgia Tech moved everything to their own platform on Canvas. I heard there were issues with it not being easy to make updates to videos on Udacity. Plus, the Udacity app never supported Georgia Tech logins like the website did, and it was a pain to view videos on mobile devices. I'm not sure of the exact reason for the move though, since it may have been a business decision.
I loved Udacity. I think without Peter Norvig's class I wouldn't have made the jump to software development. Back in 2012-2014 they were leaning on the "teach everyone to code" wave so they had lots of free content. I think they eventually got told to go make some money as bootcamps started making money in the sameish space and they basically started doing for-credit-ish collabs with universities.
I paid for a Udacity nanodegree, had a medical problem and literally didn't log into the platform for months. Meanwhile I was getting charged thousands of dollars and when I finally emailed them about it they wouldn't refund me even though I literally didn't take the class. I hope they fail.
I once paid Udacity $200 a month back in... 2013 or 2014 to get a certificate only for them to change classes and objectives continuously. I completed every single part of their program except for the exit interview, couldn't get a straight answer about whether the changes impacted me, and gave up entirely.
In my area, at least, they appear to have latched on to enterprise training spend. The courses provided were buggy and years out of date, but I imagine it made for amazing margins on content they didn't need do anything further with beyond packaging.
> and years out of date
This wasn't the case around 2014. They used to publish plenty of new courses back then.
This wasn't the case around 2014. They used to publish plenty of new courses back then.
I can absolutely see that. My earlier impression of Udacity was that they were amazing, so it was jarring to encounter the actual content. Still well founded material, but definitely showing wear.
Good question, I have fond memories of the early Python courses they released + spez’s web course. It helped me get my life back on track, during a painful time, and start my career in software development.
Exercise: make the turtle move around the screen
Related: What happened to MITx? The material is still there, but it seems they stopped adding courses ~3 years ago.
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I found it to be too Spooky!