A Happy Experience, with Tremendous Empowerment for Their Students and Completely Adorable by All?

    
     Universities, centers of knowledge have been created many years ago. They have for missions to spread, among other virtues, wisdom and true in their communities. There have been many philanthropists that are or were sharing their wealth to create these fascinating places. All of them have rules, timelines, and costs. Some of them are created by national systems and there is no tuition involved, or is just symbolic.

  The poor, the isolated, and the minorities have to struggle with all the deficiencies that their trades have, before they can join without stress the full experience of higher education. Some people can deal with a big amount of stress, others don’t and that has nothing to do with their wealth, gregarious personality, or if they are part of the general population, or normal people (statistically speaking). Nevertheless it helps to have enough money to have acquired a good basic education to pursue a higher one. To be connected to find out the easiest path with the best results, and to be part of the group to work together and enjoy the synergy of learning as part of a team.

   How to know if the course, courses you are taking are going to enrich in an effective way your career? Wow! For that, I have heard so many opinions; you almost can have a book of them. Just some of them are; it doesn’t matter what courses you take as long as you know, you have connections, you must be part of the people with influences so, go to institutions where the children of the top society are. Another opinion is; go where you know the institution has more successful and prestigious alumni and/or professors. Go where you can have personalized guidance and mentoring. Go where you can have the most diverse community, go where you are the opposite of your family values, go where you can afford it, go where moral and religion is first; go as far (or as close) as your parents are. Go where they value the people’s voice. Go where you have the most parties, best installations, best dorms etc, etc, etc… When you are there;

    as a student sometimes you get into the stressful facts of a) a great deal is expected of you and b) you have no control over whether you will perform well; according to Martin Seligman. And well, that is not nice.

  Oh no! What are all those aspects, why is not simply, what are the institutions of knowledge doing?

   Besides the campuses, and personal, they have a master plan for each career. They got into that plan with some key elements; the industry, the government, the professors, and students. They plan for the future, they analyze trends, market, necessities and the most probable scenario that can occur when people graduate.

   As you can see, it is a combination of facts that can be target with accuracy, if you know your data, and you have a good stochastic method to apply; the outcome will have a reasonable, hopeful outcome. We can use the term believe in many statements explaining why an institution decides something over many options. The truth is that there is the technology and mathematical methods to be more precise than ever if we can simulate with enough and correct numbers. The future can be known with a narrow clearance; to a scale so narrow that we can almost said that we are certain of a successful career. And that is why I totally know that the technology used in Udacity to choose the classes, the professors, the amount of time expending, and the grading system is the best. Just take the class of Artificial Intelligence with Sebastian Thrun.

    As a new way of learning, or new system, data is needed. It is not sprouted randomly, they have to collect enough information to create a model, which by this time, it is very optimistic to say but perfectly reasonable to think they do.

    So, Udacity is a center of knowledge, they have rules, timelines and costs. They have philanthropists, a mission, and a virtual campus that is composed by the forums, coffee breaks, hang outs, contests, and other beautiful and useful things, to interact with their community.

     Udacity have the collaboration of not only one university but several, and the industry has a vital presence. They have a verify certification which is a key factor to acknowledge the rigor and recognition of a learned skill.

    When you are a student, you are the product of an educational institution, one of the most stressful things for a mentor, teacher, professor, or educator is the idea that…” The ability of a student to do well in a class has something to do with their class”… a quote from the book Brain Rules by John Medina.

    To solve this anguish statement people go to the statistics and if they have, like at Udacity, a pass rate of 83% surpassing many of other classes in other campuses; it is when we can dance in the rain because we know, they conquered a storm. That is a huge achievement! As a student your concerns of performance are gone, and yes, a great deal was expected from you; you have sweated it and earned it; in a controlled, wonderful, and nice environment; with an assertive amount of stress. Because think of it, you know you did it, and you feel it in your brain, nothing can change that inner satisfaction, that helps to go on and on.

    So, who are the clients in a center of knowledge? Students, their families, communities, countries, and the world are. The students have the duality of being the product and the client, this paradox come from the bare nature of knowledge which is part of the unique trait of being humans and have fun learning and developing our cortex during our existence.

   Many of these thoughts have been evolving in me for many years, due to my experience as a professor of Industrial Engineering, and as an Educator and Tutor; I think this is the time to put them down as a response to a call by Sebastian Thrun for a public discussion about Udacity offerings, and the future of higher education. For the enrolling of many, we can see it as a happy experience, with tremendous empowerment for their students and completely adorable by all Udacian’s Communities.

Oh! No! Have you seen the San Jose Newspapers!!!

Have you seen the San Jose Newspapers!!! I was happy, then a black cloud somber my horizon! :(
Oh!!! No!!! What is going on!!! Failure!!! Poor rates!!! Look at the performance!!!
Some Media and their ways of putting things....
Remediation classes… Ha! It is exactly the word that put in a very questionable position the origin of an Olympian, wonderful, and amazing set of tools that Udacity is… It is also an experiment, and the population is a very special one. For one year+ Udacity has delivered in a very concise format a huge amount of knowledge. Udacity is a place to enjoy and learn; if remediation was the challenge then you do not put unreachable constrains if you want good comments from the Press; if your objective is to experiment then go ahead and learn from your experience, and that is a success.
In Udacity or while learning in any arena you need to have time to experiment, explore, try, challenge, dare, improve your abilities; which ones… well let’s see an example; when mankind were learning to play with electronic games some 20+ years ago, first we needed to learn to press the right buttons for any special movement, then it came the combinations; after, you are able to do the series of nested combinations. Nowadays, you can easily point out who has been playing for a long time just because it came natural to them all the micro movements they need to do in the fastest precise way to win over the opponent.
The population for remediation has very different problems to deal with but, the worst pervasive one is the LACK OF TIME as I just read and concurred in Sebastian Thrun post explanation. Next to that one is the pressure to repeat a concept in certain time and with that believe that you are going to assure success. The brain doesn't work like that… it is boring and then the attention to detail is lost in an abyss of boredom. Every single person who needs remediation needs to be diagnosed exactly with the special need or with the located misunderstood concept and start from that or those, people can have many. It needs to have a systematic approach of assistance. That means to diagnose from the beginning what are you dealing with. Or at least have a history of what has been happening.
What I have learned, study and seen in the amazing wonderful universe of learning is that it needs to be INTERESTING. Not long time ago a person told me to repeat courses that I have already taken. Wow! I was furious, and I refused for a long time, then I meditated. If I have already passed them then I can look at them again in another perspective, since I do not have any pressure but my own. I am taking my time and refuel my patience to hear the same things by the same people in the same manner. Well I do not reread books, I don’t see movies twice in a regular basis, it needs to be very, very good to make me do it. It is not the same if you read a book and then you see the movie, or the play of it. Theater is magic because no performance is the same because people behave differently every time, so it is not boring. With this I want you to notice that emotions are there you can not avoid them. Once you fail something you have a sour thought about it, that is stress...
You can learn the same thing in different platforms, or formats; learn with unlimited examples, experiences, games, contexts; the rule is always pursuing to be interesting! I did not invented it, there are many studies that talk about that I just concurred from my experience.
Our knowledge behaves like an onion, it has many layers; they started to form the same day you become alive. According to your experiences is the type of knowledge you have. That is one thing.
Knowledge behaves like energy does; one person can have it or a group of persons without changing the force. The wonderful thing is that a difference of energy, it can be storage. It is not like power, or money; it is really a sharable thing. Everybody gets enriched. You have seen how a student can explain to another student the concept in a particular proper vocabulary and Eureka everything became clear.
When people are stressed, they learn like a Swiss cheese, with holes. Or like with wrinkles in their layers or with jumps between them. So, in order to have perfect onions or layers of knowledge you need to peel the onion and check where the fault is. It can be done with a one on one assistant, or with software. The quality of the remediation outcome lies in the efficiency of the model use to locate the hole and how to fix it. Who does the software? It is People. Who does the tutoring? It is People. In every single origin of knowledge the primal source is People. Who is going to hire you? Who is making jobs? Who is designing courses? Who is putting the standards or conditions to say you know something? Always, the answer is People.
So, why it is this whole debacle idea and the debate about it that the Press is taking out of proportions? Udacity is a proven source of top-notch knowledge. The good thing is that a critical mass of people understands that online education is for the good of Humanity. So, for majority and for leadership we can keep forging in the right direction for a better future. There are many links on the web talking about this with big names and/or wallets that are helping. I just read the Scientific American article of this month about Learning in the digital age. Sebastian Thrun also explained it in the Udacity Global Meetup Day, you can see it in YouTube. Thank you to all of you! I think it is an unstoppable phenomenon. People need to be reassured that everything is going to be absolutely better. And by the way, once you take your course online if you are on the remediation club, you can go back and look in a calm manner what you missed. If nobody helps you, look inside yourself maybe you will find the best answer. A good idea if you find a way to succeed is just to give feedback.
Use Udacity or some other distinct MOOC's as what they are a wonderful source of knowledge. Being a little bit dramatic you can see it as some Prometheuses are giving fire to humanity, Udacity and some of the MOOC's give knowledge to mankind. The good thing is that this time The Gods are dancing of joy because that is the way humans can prevail in the Cosmos.