Before my wife became a writer, she was a director at Massachusetts General Hospital. In this position she met a lot of interesting people. Among them was Dr. Thomas Bernard Kinane, a pediatric pulmonologist. One day, he recommended that she watch Sebastian Thrun on the Charlie Rose television show.
She was impressed enough with Sebastian and what he had to say, that she made me sit down and view the show myself.
(Please visit the site to view this video)
On the show, Sebastian talked about, and demonstrated, a technological innovation called Google Glass [see Sebastian’s interview at time 16:40]. This was the first time Google Glass was shown to a journalist. Sebastian, among many other things, is a Google Fellow, designed Google StreetView, the self-driving car, was the leader of Google X Lab, and was a CMU and Standford professor for robotics and artificial intelligence. He is the most accomplished and revered innovator that I have had the pleasure to meet (more on that later).
Google Glass is certainly very interesting to me, as an engineer. However, what really struck a chord with me was his mentioning of Udacity, the online university providing Massive Open Online Courses, MOOCs.
In my position at Cadence Design Systems, I have been involved in developing training for engineers for many years. Before I learned about Udacity, I heard of the works of Salman Khan and his Khan Academy in an OnPoint interview. I was fascinated by his approach, and I tried to apply it to my work by creating a series of videos that help engineers ramp up on very specific and niche concepts and software features. It quickly became the most viewed video series on the Cadence YouTube channel.
During this time we were exploring other methods for training more engineers in an effective manner. As a result, the MOOC approach that Udacity was taking sounded very compelling and suitable for our needs. Shortly after I watched the Charlie Rose interview [see the Udacity segment at time 26:40] I approached Udacity and got the opportunity to meet Sebastian himself. Somehow, I was able to convince him [it still baffles me as to how I pulled that off] to let Cadence create a class with Udacity! This class became CS348 Functional Hardware Verification.
As a side note–a few months later, a Time magazine article titled College is Dead. Long Live College! about MOOCs and Udacity was published as the cover story. It was then that I found out that I was very lucky indeed to have been selected as an instructor, because Sebastian had already turned down 500 university professors who volunteered to create courses for Udacity!
To wrap this up, my adventure with MOOCs and my encounter with Sebastian would have never occurred had my wife not had the insight to force me to view the Charlie Rose program. I am very grateful for her recommendation as it allowed me to become an instructor at Udacity.
Stay udacious!
Axel Scherer