OMSCS Open Courseware

I was the head of enterprise curriculum in 2018 and an OMSCS grad in 2016. This was a weird time to work for Udacity and the company went thru a major shakeup in 2019. The “breakup” with GT happened before the focus on enterprise and the enterprise focus was somewhat short-lived as the CEO was replaced just as enterprise was ascending as the primary revenue stream. COVID was rough for Udacity, and content production was commoditized.

That’s counterintuitive. If COVID couldn’t bring in business, what could?

I imagine what it means is basically, "Before COVID, universities had to collaborate with Udacity to produce these courses and manage course credits/online degrees. Now they realized that they can easily do it themselves (perhaps at the institution level)"

In 2013-2016 Udacity was very actively collaborating with GT and had in-house content production. The projects were designed by highly experienced instructors in direct partnerships with real companies to make them realistic and relevant, and there was a small army of hand-picked mentors and graders to review and provide feedback.

Unemployment was _relatively_ high at that time, so individual consumers were eager to invest their own time & money to upskill and differentiate themselves. By 2018 unemployment hit record lows and suddenly it was _employers_ who were struggling to attract talent and wanted to differentiate themselves by offering upskill training as a benefit along with highly intentional training programs to organically grow the hard-to-hire talent from their existing workforce. This precipitated a shift from huge growth in the consumer side to growth in the enterprise business.

Contemporaneously, platforms like Udemy and Pluralsight commoditized content creation. Pluralsight bragged that it cost them $15k to launch a new course—orders of magnitude less than it cost us in house. Udacity pivoted away from high quality in house production to more partnerships with external content creators and identified the project grading and mentorship services as the largest cost drivers of ongoing course support costs.

As growth wasn’t tracking fast enough, Udacity closed most of the international offices—except India—then had two rounds of layoffs where the remaining content production was practically eliminated, and the mentorship and grading were commoditized by transferring the programs to the Udacity India office to administrate. All the hand-picked and trained graders and mentors were eliminated.

Then COVID hit. (I was gone by then.) I heard Udacity raised a debt round, but I think they were stuck against headwinds from the past few years. Eventually they were acquired for an “undisclosed sum”.

So what could have brought in more business? IMO, focusing on what was working for us, not trying to pivot into what worked for someone else. The problem I think is that we weren’t on track to make a reasonable return on all the money raised. We were trying to swing for the fences, even if it meant eventually striking out.

Nah. There was some of that as the tools available to unis improved alongside Udacity, but it was a very intentional choice. The business with GT made $X/year while the consumer & enterprise businesses brought in $20X/year. It seemed like we could maybe double the OMSCS or scale linearly with effort by making more partnerships, meanwhile the other lines scaled faster with much less effort. Terminating this partnership was just one of the business lines that got cut off to focus everything on the lines that were growing much faster.