{"id":957,"date":"2013-11-15T18:52:43","date_gmt":"2013-11-15T17:52:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/orfeu.org\/2013\/11\/15\/george-siemens-puts-it-clearly-udacitys-failure-is-just-thruns-failure-nothing-else\/"},"modified":"2025-12-08T16:20:23","modified_gmt":"2025-12-08T15:20:23","slug":"george-siemens-udacity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/josemota.pt\/sr\/george-siemens-udacity\/","title":{"rendered":"George Siemens on Udacity"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><span class=\"proflinkWrapper\">George Siemens<\/span> puts it clearly &#8211; Udacity&#8217;s failure is just Thrun&#8217;s failure, nothing else.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><em>Well, there it is folks. After two years of hype, breathless proclamations about how Udacity will transform higher education, Silicon Valley blindness to existing learning research, and numerous articles\/interviews featuring Sebastian Thrun, Udacity has failed.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><em>No one did more of a disservice to MOOCs than Thrun through his wild proclamations (\u201cwe have found the magic combination for online learning\u201d and \u201cin the future there will only be 10 universities\u201d, digital learning manifestos, and so on) and self-aggrandizing. No one will do more damage to MOOCs as a concept than Thrun now that he realizes how unfounded his s<\/em>tatements actually were.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><em>This is not a failure of open education, learning at scale, online learning, or MOOCs. Thrun tied his fate too early to VC funding. As a result, Udacity is now driven by revenue pursuits, not innovation. He promised us a bright future of open learning. He delivered to us something along the lines of a 1990\u2032s corporate elearning program.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">George Siemens,\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.elearnspace.org\/blog\/2013\/11\/15\/the-failure-of-udacity\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">The Failure of Udacity<\/a>, November 15, 2013<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>George Siemens puts it clearly &#8211; Udacity&#8217;s failure is just Thrun&#8217;s failure, nothing else. Well, there it is folks. After two years of hype, breathless proclamations about how Udacity will transform higher education, Silicon Valley blindness to existing learning research, and numerous articles\/interviews featuring Sebastian Thrun, Udacity has failed. No one did more of a [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-957","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-s-r"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pa7w8s-fr","jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/josemota.pt\/sr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/957","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/josemota.pt\/sr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/josemota.pt\/sr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/josemota.pt\/sr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/josemota.pt\/sr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=957"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/josemota.pt\/sr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/957\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2037,"href":"https:\/\/josemota.pt\/sr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/957\/revisions\/2037"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/josemota.pt\/sr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=957"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/josemota.pt\/sr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=957"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/josemota.pt\/sr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=957"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}