Sebastian Thrun: MOOCs, Angry Birds, and Lifelong Learning

We’re speaking with a hot name in disruptive innovation, Sebastian Thrun.  He’s part of our conversation on hacking higher education. He’s the founder of the Google X lab, immersed in robotics and artificial intelligence, in building driverless car, but he’s more than all that.  Three years ago he offered his Stanford University introduction to artificial intelligence class — online for free — and quickly had an enrollment of over 160,000 students from all over the world. It was the start of a craze in so-called MOOCs – massive open online courses – a craze he’s still retooling.  The company he started in his living room, Udacity, is now set on reinventing higher ed inside a computer on a billion-dollar scale.  We asked him for his essential principles in remaking the university.