NO SURPRISES HERE: Google will be designing curriculum for "Nanodegree" courses offered by Udacity; the first will be a program in Android development. The announcement, made at Google's I/O conference, should come as no surprise: Udacity CEO Sebastian Thrun has strong ties from his days at Google X. Udacity has previously offered courses on Android development, and has already partnered with companies like AT&T to create other Nanodegrees.
The Android Nanodegree consists of six courses and is expected to take nine to 12 months to complete. It costs $200 per month, and top 50 students will be invited for a three-day career summit at Google's headquarters. Fortune reports Udacity and Google are working on three more Nanodegrees on advanced web development, cloud computing and entrepreneurship that will be available later this year.
During his session at Google I/O 2015, Thrun affirmed Udacity will focus its offerings on technology courses. "We really want people to find employment as a proxy for contributing to society." He later added:
"The thing[s] we're probably never going to do [are] philosophy or art history. Or if we do it...I want to do it in a way that the people coming out of these humanities classes are absolutely employable by Facebook and Google and tech companies because I think there is a great shortage of great humanities thinking in the tech field."
Here's Sebastian Thrun's talk about Udacity at Google I/O 2015:
