Inside Udacity's struggle to reinvent and democratize higher education

Sebastian Thrun left a high-powered Silicon Valley life — working in Google's secretive Google X lab, teaching about artificial intelligence and robots at Stanford — to pursue what he deemed a higher calling. A study found that only seven percent of people who take a class like Udacity's actually finish, and most that do already had bachelor's degrees to begin with — free online courses have hardly been the democratizing, wide-reaching force Thrun and others had hoped for. Fast Company's Max Chafkin paints Thrun as a lover of the humanities, talking about robots in terms of human ideas and human behavior.

via Tech News Headlines - Yahoo! News http://www.theverge.com/2013/11/17/5114092/udacity-struggle-reinvent-higher-education