Sebastian Thrun:

I just want to congratulate you. You’ve actually in these three classes learned pretty much as much as any of my Stanford students learn in my specialized AI classes on robotics when it comes to robot perception. In fact, you’ve learned pretty much what there is to know when it comes to being a successful practitioner in robotics.

I have no way of evaluating the truth of those claims, but the numbers beggar belief. If Thrun has managed to do in three weeks what previously took him ten in Stanford’s classrooms, that raises a few possibilities:

1. Thrun wasted a lot of time in his Stanford classrooms.
2. Thrun covered the same quantity of material in his Stanford classrooms but the quality of that coverage declined.
3. Thrun is exaggerating.

My bet is some combination of two and three. It’s just awfully hard to get anything for nothing, and transferring lectures from the classroom to the Internet doesn’t buy much time.

2012 Sep 10. A blogger writes about the Udacity statistics course:

As if the content-based problems noted above weren’t enough, running throughout Thrun’s presentations is a routine, suspiciously hard-sell call for how stellar the class was and how much you, the viewer, have learned.