I am currently enrolled in that program. The program is great (I still don't believe it is so cheap). But it is not because of Udacity. It is great thanks to Piazza, professors, TAs, remote office hours, projects, students, Canvas, Slack groups, OMSCS subreddit, GaTech HPC clusters, remote labs, software licenses, student perks, and various other internal GaTech services. Udacity is just a small tool there to present a list of videos. Not a lot of professors use it for anything else. Hell, on Piazza for most courses you can even find a YouTube playlist because the Udacity web and mobile apps are incredibly bad compared to plain YouTube.

That's a good thing, isn't it?

Do we really want everything locked down and centralised or do we want a portfolio of tools, marketplaces and such adding up to an educational platform.

Sure. I think the point though is that the education provided through MOOCs like Udacity, etc. is a small part of what's needed for an educational program in most cases. After all, we've had recorded lectures for decades. For certain types of course material such as programming assignments, computer grading systems are useful as well. However, for the most part, online courses aren't really all that different from Great Courses DVDs or YouTube videos. Which is to say nice resources but not very transformative.

Not transformative or not transformative in isolation?

Being able to use the Internet to learn things is pretty transformative in aggregate of which MOOCs is a small piece. (Although, arguably, it hasn't really been transformative in the sense of the educational certifications required for most jobs, whether at the university level or specific established IT training certs.)

If you search around on HN there are more than a couple of threads speaking quite highly of this curricula. It’s probably the best MS in the world you can get in terms of value per dollar if you’re interested in applied CS.

> It’s probably the best MS in the world you can get in terms of value per dollar if you’re interested in applied CS.

It's worth pointing out, that in many parts of Europe Master's degree is either free, or costs less than 7k. Of course, the quality cannot be easily compared.

Free to the student perhaps, but generally the average cost (to whoever pays) of a year in college (masters/cs courses may be more) tends to be in the €10k-€15k range.

I guess that is a start. I would really like to see these courses enhanced by technology related tools. Personally I think the teaching method that is offered by codecadmey is genius.

I'm personally not in CS so I guess that is why my views are slightly different compared to everyone else here. I work in accounting field. In terms of quality online curriculum there is basically nothing. The ones offered on coursera are basically a joke.