The biggest disruption is zero cost, better lecture format and systematic approach.
1. Zero cost.
Yes, there are plenty of web-accessible, paid educational material. Many people make good
business from it (e.g. lynda.com). Zero cost is a differentiator.
Also, the paid material is usually vocational (e.g. teaching you how to use photoshop), not physics 101, the kind of material you study in college. I assume that's because college already exists, gives out diplomas so for-profit enterprises don't try to compete with colleges.
2. Better lecture format.
There are free, high-quality lectures (MIT's OCW etc.) but while the content might be high-quality, the experience is awful. At first I was excited about OCW but just couldn't bear to sit through 1 hr lecture with paltry written notes.
Udacity uses the format pioneered by Khan Academy of short videos, has supplemental like exercises and has a clear path from start to finish.
3. Systematic approach.
Again, compared to previous initiatives like MIT's OCW, Udacity's goal is to provide complete courses. Clearly they are at the beginning of delivering that but I think that we can all agree that their Minimal Viable Product has been very successful, which validates product-market fit, and it's also clear from interviews that Udacity has much bigger goals and they are executing pretty aggressively on them. Remember, Facebook didn't have 600 million users on the first day.
I think you've missed another very important part out.
There's a very large, and extremely active community based around each course. Some are necessarily more active than others. Most of them have the actual teachers participating and I've witnessed the forum evolves into a peer-driven help system. Peter Norvig's activity on his course's forum was astounding and I've never seen a more helpful and active online community before.
I haven't seen that with other online courses.
OCW had nothing in terms of community engagement.
Coursera does have a forum for each course, but they are very dry and the engagement factor feels missing.
I haven't had a chance to take an offering from MITx yet.
I have seen a few interviews where Udacity staff or teachers have said they deliberately wanted to engage the students and to encourage them to become active and support each other and I've seen that it's quite a big boost to the rest of the offering.
1. Zero cost.
Yes, there are plenty of web-accessible, paid educational material. Many people make good business from it (e.g. lynda.com). Zero cost is a differentiator.
Also, the paid material is usually vocational (e.g. teaching you how to use photoshop), not physics 101, the kind of material you study in college. I assume that's because college already exists, gives out diplomas so for-profit enterprises don't try to compete with colleges.
2. Better lecture format.
There are free, high-quality lectures (MIT's OCW etc.) but while the content might be high-quality, the experience is awful. At first I was excited about OCW but just couldn't bear to sit through 1 hr lecture with paltry written notes.
Udacity uses the format pioneered by Khan Academy of short videos, has supplemental like exercises and has a clear path from start to finish.
3. Systematic approach.
Again, compared to previous initiatives like MIT's OCW, Udacity's goal is to provide complete courses. Clearly they are at the beginning of delivering that but I think that we can all agree that their Minimal Viable Product has been very successful, which validates product-market fit, and it's also clear from interviews that Udacity has much bigger goals and they are executing pretty aggressively on them. Remember, Facebook didn't have 600 million users on the first day.