http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405270230380740457743...

Frustrated that his [Sebastian Thrun's] Stanford artificial intelligence class only reached 200 students, they put up a website offering an online version... In the end, there were 160,000 people signed up, from every country in the world except North Korea. Rather than tape boring lectures, the professors asked students to solve problems and then the next course video would discuss solutions. Twenty-three thousand people finished the course. The top 410 performers on exams were online students. The first Stanford student was No. 411.

Mr. Thrun's cost was basically $1 per student per class. That's on the order of 1,000 times less per pupil than for a K-12 or a college education — way more than the rule of thumb in Silicon Valley that you need a 10-times cost advantage to drive change.

So Mr. Thrun set up a company, Udacity, that joins many other companies attacking the problem of how to deliver the optimal online education. Now Mr. Thrun is talking like a true Silicon Valley entrepreneur. "The AI class was the first light. Online education will way exceed the best education today. And cheaper. If this works, we can rapidly accelerate the progress of society and the world."
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My first thought upon reading this is that if Mr. Thrun succeeds in revolutionizing higher education, he probably won't pay his fair share of taxes.

--fleg