With Google Fellow Sebastian Thrun at lunch today.
These cool glasses come with embeddded prisms that detect head rotation to immerse you in an alternate reality or 3D projection, riffing off objects in the real world… (more on Google Glasses)
Some notes from Sebastian’s talk on the founding of the Udacity MOOC:
“I was deeply inspired by seeing Sal Khan’s presentation on Khan Academy, on Youtube. Each of his videos reached more students than I would teach in a lifetime at Stanford.
I knew ftom Google that the average YouTube video view is 9 seconds.
Before we opened the first AI class, Norvig thought we would get 500 students, and I was more optimistic; I thought we might get 10,000. We went online with a paragraph description. By Sunday, we had 20,000. On Monday I got a call, as I forgot to tell Stanford abut the project. We then had many discussions!
In the end, we had 160,000 students register internationally. There were more students in Lithuania alone taking the class than Stanford students.
The top 412 students were outside Stanford. The top Stanford student was number 413.
Our all-in cost was 6 cents per student.”
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