You take the blue pill – the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill – you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes.” -Morpheus

Why would Sebastian Thrun, a prominent Stanford University computer scientist and Google researcher, give up a prestigious University appointment to start a new venture in online education?

Is Udacity part of the new gold rush in online learning? Does it represent a great leap forward in open education? What does it mean? What’s new? How is it different? And what makes these guys not the usual suspects?

Of course, we can’t rule out money as a motivating factor. Udacity is backed, after all, by heavyweight Charles River Ventures. Big players, particularly venture capitalists, don’t plonk down serious cash unless there is an ROI story. But guys like Thrun are not motivated by money. They chase dreams.

Thrun acknowledges that he was inspired by Salman Khan and the Khan Academy vision of free, universally accessible education. Only he wants to realize the same vision for higher education. Why teach robotics and software engineering to 20-50 students at Stanford when you can prepare 500,000 or even a 1,000,000 students in one fell swoop in 7 weeks. (Thrun continues to downplay the business venture dimension of Udacity, calling it a “website”).

It’s clear that Udacity is part of the global movement for open education which began with MIT’s Open Courseware in 2001. (I will be looking at MITx in a separate posting.) So far, so good. Udacity is about free online courses. Setting aside the business model that will enable the vision, is there something deeper underneath the Udacity story line? If so, what is it?

Here’s my take:

Udacity is a bold experiment which promises to test, if not shatter, our deeply held beliefs about learning. Ventures like Udacity will accelerate the inevitable market disruption in education.

All signs point to a massive disruption in the education market. There will not be a single cataclysmic event but a series of quakes, small and large, in this decade. We can also anticipate that the major tectonic activity will occur in and near online education. The question for us as educational seismologists then is to understand not the if, but where, when, and how these disruptions will occur.

The education equation for societies and nations is quite simple. How can we deliver the highest quality learning at the lowest possible cost? Improve Quality. Decrease Cost. Sounds easy. But in trying to solve this equation we run up against prevailing dogmas. One of the most entrenched states that:

Educational quality (Q) is inversely proportional to size (S) and degree of online activity (O).

Most of the substantive debates in education are in one form or another tributaries of this single dogma. According to the received view, educational quality is exemplified by the Oxford-style tutorial, where students receive continuous, interactive, and face-to-face feedback from a master tutor. The tutor is also a great scholar in the discipline. The greater we recede from this Platonic ideal of instruction, so the dogma goes, the greater the degradation in learning quality. Online education might be for the masses but it is no better than a modern reincarnation of Plato’s cave.

A corollary to this dogma is the belief that the most important contributor to learning success is the charismatic teacher. The most recent advocates and supporters of this view is the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation:  ”Evidence shows clearly what most people know intuitively: teachers matter more to student learning than anything else inside a school.” (Entrenched dogmas are not all obviously false. I was educated at Haverford College and Yale University, where class sizes were small and I received instruction from some of the best teachers and scholars in the world.)

We need to turn the “Education Quality” graph above on its head to understand the promise of Udacity and ventures like it. I predict that just as the debate between Wikipedia vs Encyclopedia Britannica is now effectively over, a decade from now (if not sooner) we will come to see that Massive Online (MO) is indeed better than Small, Face-to-Face. The real question is how it will happen and how we can make it so.

Massive Online (MO) says that we can have our cake and eat it to. We can drive down costs, enhance quality, and make education universally accessible. The importance and meaning of Udacity then is simply this:

“MO (Massive Online) is better”.

We can go further and assert that for many areas of learning MO not only is better but can and will become much, much better that small, face-to-face.

Last Fall when Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig (Director of Research @ Google) offered a free, virtual version of their Stanford Introduction to Artificial Intelligence course they were astonished that 160,000 students from around the world signed up. 20,000 students stuck it out and completed the course. That’s a very large number for a first attempt.

For Thrun the course experience was an epiphany: “In fact, Peter and I taught more students AI, than all AI professors in the world combined. This one class had more educational impact than my entire career.” The epiphany wasn’t just that the reach was greater. Liz Gannes notes, for example, in All Things D that “Of 248 students who received perfect scores in the class, none of them attended the Stanford version; all were online.” In his talk at the DLD Conference in Munich (see below) Thrun observes that the camrederie and support systems that developed organically among women students was particularly gratifying to see, since computer science and artificial intelligence still tend to be male dominated fields.

Thrun began to realize paradoxically that MO opens up  new and exciting teaching and learning dynamics that’s just not possible in small, face-to-face courses. It’s a paradox but all great things begin with a paradox. “Having done this, I can’t teach at Stanford again.”  Thrun describes his decision to leave Stanford and found Udacity as a choice between taking a red pill or a blue pill, a la “The Matrix.”

The Udacity vision is an important step in the global democratization of learning. In many knowledge domains MO will outstrip traditional forms of delivery.  In future posts I will describe some of the key technology and business breakthroughs that I believe will be needed as we move forward with the MO vision.

It seems then that finally the dream of universal, open, accessible education is within reach. Which pill will you take?