Who owns udacity

Soon, fellow roboticists David Stavens and Mike Sokolsky got involved, and by the time the first course began, it had more than , students enrolled. In January , Udacity announced a partnership with San Jose State University to offer a series of lower-level classes for a cost that was much less than traditional tuition. It didn't take long for the experiment to go off the rails.

A mere six months later, in July , SJSU suspended its relationship with Udacity, citing unacceptably low pass rates for the company's online offerings. In an interview years later with TechCrunch, Thrun described the brief partnership as "a little bit of a fiasco. It also prompted a change to the C-suite, with Udacity bringing on former GV advisor Shernaz Daver as its chief marketing officer.

The hire of Daver proved to be a stroke of genius. She was key in Udacity's move toward vocational training and focused nanodegrees, helping the company develop new relationships with companies like Netflix and Walmart that were ultimately much more effective than its deal with SJSU.

Daver stuck around at Udacity until , when she returned to GV. She now serves as an advisor to both Kitty Hawk the autonomous flying taxi startup also co-founded by Thrun and 10x Genomics. Shortly thereafter, in November , VentureBeat reported that Udacity was conducting more layoffs. And this April, the business parted ways with another 75 employees, according to TechCrunch, bringing its total workforce down to about full-time employees. Why is Udacity a for-profit company? But Khan Academy is nonprofit.

Stanford University is a nonprofit. Thrun says he wants to democratize higher education, offering knowledge to the world for free. How does this mission fit with his for-profit online university? And then there are some questions about Thrun and his relationship to Stanford.

How should Stanford University think about what Thrun has done? Felix Salmon expresses regret that Stanford was willing to invest millions in building a campus in New York City but seems unwilling to have helped Thrun build a virtual university with global reach under the Stanford name.

Perhaps this is true. Or perhaps there is a much more complicated story beneath the surface. It turns out that a company called KnowLabs Inc had developed the course website and accompanying course content the same content that was being offered to the actual Stanford students.

As the blogger observes, this makes the Stanford AI class sound more like a Silicon Valley start-up than Stanford University innovating with a new form of course delivery. What exactly was the relationship between Stanford and KnowLabs Inc.? What is the current relationship between KnowLabs and Udacity? The company was able to accomplish this, he said, by changing its whole approach to video with taping, edits and student assessments happening in real time.

Udacity has hired about mentors who will work between 15 and 20 hours a week on a contract basis. The company is targeting about mentors in all.

Thrun described the new mentor program as the biggest change in service in the entire history of Udacity. The strategy has met with some resistance. Some employees wanted to test the mentorship program on one cohort, or group of students, and expand from there.

Even since these recent changes, some employees have expressed doubts that it will be enough, according to unnamed sources connected to or within the company.

But we have programs in that graduate more than 90 percent of our students. In the U. Udacity has continued to increase revenue, although at a slower rate than the previous year-over-year time period. But in September, the company made enterprise a dedicated product and hired a VP of sales to bring in new customers. Udacity has added 20 new enterprise clients from the banking, insurance, telecom and retail sectors, according to the company.

There are now 70 enterprise customers globally that send employees through Udacity programs to gain new skills.