<story><title>Udacity and the future of online universities</title><url>http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2012/01/23/udacity-and-the-future-of-online-universities/</url><text></text></story><parent_chain><item><author>ramanujan</author><text>Part of the backstory here is that ai-class.com is by Udacity (Sebastian Thrun), while ml-class.org and pgm-class.org are by Coursera (Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller). Formerly colleagues from the same department, now competitors with very similar education startups, all the way down to the naming conventions. Lot of fur flying about who copied who.&lt;p&gt;Coursera has been launching a ton of classes[1]. Probably Sebastian feels that to beat Andrew and Daphne, he has to go full time.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cs101-class.org/hub.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.cs101-class.org/hub.php&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>plinkplonk</author><text>&quot; Formerly colleagues from the same department, now competitors with very similar education startups&quot;&lt;p&gt;(Without taking sides, and somewhat tangentially) &lt;i&gt;if&lt;/i&gt; true, we consumers are in for a good time. Competition,especially with such formidable people leading rival companies, is awesome.</text></comment>
<story><title>Udacity and the future of online universities</title><url>http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2012/01/23/udacity-and-the-future-of-online-universities/</url><text></text></story><parent_chain><item><author>ramanujan</author><text>Part of the backstory here is that ai-class.com is by Udacity (Sebastian Thrun), while ml-class.org and pgm-class.org are by Coursera (Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller). Formerly colleagues from the same department, now competitors with very similar education startups, all the way down to the naming conventions. Lot of fur flying about who copied who.&lt;p&gt;Coursera has been launching a ton of classes[1]. Probably Sebastian feels that to beat Andrew and Daphne, he has to go full time.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cs101-class.org/hub.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.cs101-class.org/hub.php&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>gallamine</author><text>So, does this explain the unexpected delay of the Spring ML-Class? I haven&apos;t heard any news until a few days ago when I got an email saying there were delays in starting the new semester.</text></comment>