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| Source: TED |
Sebastian Thrun and Salman Khan talk about about online education and the future of education in TED’s Questions Worth Asking series.
The excerpt below, originally posted on the TED blog on January 28, 2014, features the question of whether either man would hire someone whose education comes solely from online classes. As it turns out, both have hired based on demonstrated skill and without looking at degrees. What follows is a discussion of life-long learning, online education, and bridging the skills gap for employment.
TED: Would either of you hire somebody whose education came solely from online classes or MOOCs?
Salman Khan: If you’re talking about the skills that we’re hiring for, the stuff that’s typically learned in college or graduate school, then absolutely. In fact, we already have. We recently hired two people and we didn’t even know what their degrees were, if they even had degrees. We hired them because of the work they did on the computer science platform on Khan Academy.
Sebastian Thrun: Yes, the same is true here. And we go around companies and ask that same question, especially in startup-land, and we very frequently hear that the attention that’s being paid to degrees is being diminished. That is, more and more people are being hired on their work samples, on the projects they’ve done, the type of portfolios they’ve developed, and that’s something that’s very easy for Udacity students. And we hired a whole bunch of people ourselves from our network, completely oblivious to their degree but based on their ability to solve problems and socially interact with other people in our discussion forums. One of our main hiring funnels has become our own network of our own students.
Now, I should say, the MOOC movement has often been pitched as “MOOCs against college.” And I don’t think that’s a fair perspective. I don’t think the Salman Khan movement is a “movement against K-12,” and I don’t hear Sal saying he’d like to replace K-12. I don’t think it would be even feasible to think of MOOCs as a replacement for college. I think of them more as an augmentation. I think there’s a lifelong learning need, specifically for people who work in a fast-moving industry such as technology, to just stay up to date. What we find in general is that the certificates that we give people, when we talk to employers, carry a lot of weight, because they really relate to the types of skills you need to have to be successful in the field. Over 50% of our students already have an advanced degree, and they really want to empower themselves to do a certain type of job that they couldn’t have done otherwise, and getting a second degree might just not be feasible, given the cost and the requirements. With our Udacity MOOCs, learning now takes place throughout life on demand, when you need it. You can go and very quickly learn a skill that you need.
Read the entire TED conversation here. Browse the Udacity course catalog and choose a course to update your skill set, whether in web development, data science, or any of our other great courses!
