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Upskilling students by making learning accessible, affordable, engaging and highly effective

Key facts

  • Headquartered in California, Udacity¹ has developed 12 courses and 26 free courseware modules that are available across the globe.
  • Udacity’s mission is to bring accessible, affordable, engaging and highly effective learning to the world.
  • Founded in 2011, Udacity has recently exceeded a valuation of $1 billion, having raised $161 million in funding from venture capital funds.
  • It has 1.6 million global users and six scholarship programmes to upskill more marginalized groups

Uniqueness

  • Udacity offers interactive online courses, developed in partnership with industry leaders to students.
  • Courses delivered by Udacity are highly relevant as they teach skills that industry employers need today, providing courses at a fraction of the cost of traditional schools.
  • Udacity relies on a community of teachers and students to provide trainings for the programming skills.

Value

  • 15 large enterprises (including Google, PWC and Microsoft) have become hiring partners with Udacity, benefitting the strong global pipeline of digital talent.
  • Multistakeholder collaboration between entrepreneurs (e.g. Steve Blank), educational institutions (e.g. Georgia Tech College of Computing) and digital enterprises (e.g. AT&T) has enabled Udacity to gain credibility and relevance across a wide variety of platforms for employment.
  • “Nanodegree” courses cost $2,400 for 12 months and students are accredited with a “compact” online degree.

Approach

  • To help close the digital skills gap, Udacity collaborated with industry leaders such as AT&T, Autodesk, Cloudera, Salesforce, Amazon and Facebook to create course content by Silicon Valley that reflects skills needed in the growing digital marketplace.
  • Students acquire skills through a series of online courses and hands-on projects.
  • The pressing demand from businesses for digital skills has catalysed the success of Udacity, with companies like Accenture investing in courses to retrain 5,000 US veterans to become Java programmers.

Udacity is one of more than 100 case studies identified as part of the World Economic Forum’s Digital Transformation of Industries initiative.  An overview of the DTI program can be found here.

1. Source: Udacity, NY Times, WEF/Accenture Analysis

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