What motivates a professor, who is a Research Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University, a Google Fellow, and a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the German Academy of Sciences, to abandon his job and start his own online university? It appears that thousands of enthusiastic students had much to do with Dr. Thrun’s decision. Dr. Thrun’s articifical intelligence class at Stanford attracted over 160,000 students online in spite of poor video production quality.

According to The Chronicle of Higher Educations’ Wired Campus blog, Dr. Thrun wasn’t satisfied with the lack of  innovation in modern teaching practices in spite of technological innovations.

During the era when universities were born,

“the lecture was the most effective way to convey information. We had the industrialization, we had the invention of celluloid, of digitial media, and, miraculously, professors today teach exactly the same way they taught a thousand years ago,”

Enter Udacity. Udacity’s goal is to offer courses that are both high quality and low-cost. Using the economics of the Internet, Udacity aims to connect some of the greatest teachers to hundreds of thousands of students in almost every country on Earth.

Udacity is starting out small with two courses that begin February 20, 2012. The Introduction to Computer Science course, which assumes no previous computer programming experience, takes students through building a search engine like Google or Yahoo! in seven weeks. Impressive. The more advanced  Programming a Robotic Car, assumes competency in programming. The new start-up is hiring, so more content is surely in the works. Judging by Stanford’s popular free online courses and the MITx concept developing, higher education may experience serious disruption in 2012. The long tail of all of those non-traditional students is about to shift education towards democratized learning. Coupled with a weakened economy in much of the world and the rising cost of traditional higher education, options like Udacity prepares these learners for jobs in high-paying fields that might otherwise be out of reach for them. Where will it lead? Ultimately, Udacity and similar online offerings will change the world by bringing extremely prestigious and high-quality learning opportunities to everyone in the world with an internet connection. Expect Udacity and similar online universities to expand offerings to include foreign languages and business and economics courses. Where does that leave traditional brick and mortar schools? Those that don’t adapt to this new landscape may find themselves shrinking steadily along with libraries and newspapers.