"Companies no longer limit technology to engineers, want all staff to improve their skills"

Udacity is a Silicon Valley-based start-up founded by Sebastian Thrun as part of a Stanford University experiment in 2011 in which Thrun Research Director and Google, Peter Norvig, offered his free course Introduction to artificial intelligence. More than 160,000 students from 190 countries are enrolled and Udacity was born in 2012. The global brand edtech earned $ 70 million in revenue in 2017, up from $ 29 million the year before. In 2014, he launched his popular nonodegrees – short online courses on AI and machine learning. In India, Udacity is headquartered in Bengaluru and says its turnover has increased by 200% over the three years it has spent in the country.
Vish Makhijani
CEO, Udacity, and
Ishan Gupta
MD, Udacity India, tell
YOU
why they focus on improving skills.

the general fear that people are losing jobs to technology. Which sectors are likely to be the most affected?

Makhijani: It started with computer services, but now it goes well beyond that. I hear business leaders who want to train their financial divisions in artificial intelligence and machine learning. The current wave of technological change around AI and ML affects many businesses. There is a positive way to look at it and in a negative way. The negative way is that individuals will be irrelevant. The good thing is that people are graduated towards a state of mind focused on growth and lifelong learning.

The previous technological change was slower, today it is fast. Does this mean that people must continue to improve their skills?

Makhijani: Unlike the first time people went to college once and served them forever, today everyone needs to adapt as technology advances . At Udacity, for example, we review our nanodisks from time to time. Our course development people constantly check the right time to add or remove something from the course. Unlike the college model, where some research is done and this material is taught for 10 years, we update our nanowells from time to time.


Who are the people returning to learn new skills?

Makhijani: We have more than one million people with us in India. Most of them are professionals seeking a career change inside or outside the organization. A trend that we have seen in India is more engineering students who are taking these courses. They want to understand and learn the technologies that will help them shape their profession. They are ambitious and want to learn things that can move them forward in their careers.

Do you also work with certain organizations? What interests them?


Gupta: We work with Infosys, Myntra, Wipro and Flipkart. They are interested in machine learning and data science. With Infosys, we are working on autonomous autonomous technology.

Makhijani: In India, companies not only want engineers to learn new technologies, they want every individual in every sector to learn.

The government also talks about skills development. Do you have ongoing projects with central or state governments?

Gupta: We work with the APSSDC (Andhra Pradesh State Skill Development Corporation) and training of state engineers. The government has a channel to identify students and we are improving them.

What does the future look like for Edtech globally and in India?

Makhijani: There is a need to redefine, and people have started to take it seriously. The global market for clbadrooms and smart clbadrooms is expected to grow from $ 43 billion in 2015 to $ 93 billion in 2020.

Gupta: Edtech is difficult to execute. If you teach the same skill to everyone, then everyone knows it, and what's special about it? We need to make sure that we are continually evolving to teach the right skills, the right courses. Online education in India will grow about 8 times over the next five years, according to a recent report by Google and KPMG. There is a lot of competition in India and so it is essential to talk about our value proposition. We will tell people that capacity is different from others.