Online education is revolutionizing learning with the likes of platforms Udacity and Hujiang increasing learning access in their respective ways. While Udacity is looking to expand curriculum offerings beyond core courses, Hujiang is making education more accessible to remote and rural areas.
According to Reuters the rise in demand for digital skills among professionals is driving Udacity to redefine their focus of online education offerings. Whereas Udacity successfully made a name as an online education firm that offered standard college courses, vocational courses geared for professionals will become their new focus.
Udacity reportedly launched in Germany proving that online education is becoming a more profitable industry each year. "We have spoken to many CEOs in sectors like automotive, telecommunications and others - banking - and interest is very high," Sebastian Thrun, who co-founded Udacity with David Stavens and Mike Sokolsky, said.
As an online education company, Udacity is now worth over $1 billion. This is expected to increase significantly given Udacity's aim of standing at the juncture for responding to industry shortage on software experts and engineers that can cope with the high-tech features demanded by various markets.
Elsewhere in China, online education is as much a game changer. CCTV reports that a charity program set up by the online education firm Hujiang is seeing participation by as many as 500 schools 20 provinces.
Hujiang's online education charity program is currently benefitting as many as 100,000 students from remote and rural areas. According to CCTV, online learning with Hujiang and similar firms is enabling students to achieve learning of which they only previously dreamt.
With the Hujiang online education charity program, a teacher in Shanghai, for example, can ably teach all the requisite grade-level coursework for students located in a remote school in the Henan province. In the past, such remote schools would only have been able to teach their pupils Chinese and Maths.
However, with the Hujiang online education charity program these pupils are now able to learn English, Science and other standard course subjects, including arts. Whereas the lack of teachers, as well as rustic infrastructure, had been a challenge for these remote schools, online education with Hujiang does away with these barriers.
