Udacity, established in June of 2011, is an American for-profit educational organization founded by Sebastian Thrun, David Stavens, and Mike Sokolsky offering massive open online courses. According to Thrun, the origin of the name Udacity comes from the company’s desire to be “audacious for you, the student.” The current Chief Executive Officer of Udacity is Kai Roemelt. The platform has over 16.9 million registered users in more than 240 countries around the world. The platform started when Thrun and Peter Norvig, both instructors at Stanford University decided to offer an “Introduction to Artificial Intelligence” course online for free. Over 160,000 students from over 190 countries enrolled in the course. Consequently, Udacity’s mission was born; to make lifelong learning more equitable and inclusive.

On Udacity’s webpage, you will find a range of courses ranging from Artificial intelligence to business, executive leadership, and product management among others that you can select. In addition, you can choose to either ‘start for free’ or use ‘Udacity for business.’ As the name implies, if you start for free, you can access free courses and programs on the platform while the business one is primarily designed for teams that may want to grow professionally and acquire new skills, as a group. Under this section, there are three different plans: Team, Team Pro, and Enterprise with different features for each plan and they are all for a fee that is from several hundreds of dollars to thousands of dollars.

Udacity operates as an educational institution with various schools offering a range of programs. For instance, the School of Executive Leadership provides courses such as AI for Business Leaders, Cybersecurity, Data Science, Cloud Computing, and Digital Transformation, all accessible under the ‘Learn’ tab.

Another interesting feature that Udacity has is ‘Udacity for Nations’ which aims at cultivating digital talent within national borders as a surefire strategy for economic advancement. Through this, Udacity has achieved some notable features in different countries like Egypt and Saudi Arabia. In Egypt, Udacity’s partnership with the government has made it easier for citizens to secure high-paying jobs in government through software development. In Saudi Arabia, Udacity helped create jobs for thousands of people by providing Nanodegree programs for the job-ready population.

The most interesting feature that Udacity has is its blog which offers career guidance and tips for student success, and discusses progress in artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, digital transformation, and more. The blog has different sections for enterprises, learners, government, tech, and product news and it is a powerful resource to get reliable information. Udacity is a great site to grow professionally especially if you are looking for a career in tech. You can visit the site here.