Google has a problem, and it's turning to Sebastian Thrun, the godfather of online higher education, for an answer.
"There's a huge shortage of Android developers," said Thrun, the cofounder and CEO of online-education company Udacity. "We estimate the number of open jobs in the hundreds of thousands right now."
Thrun, who used to run Google's X lab and led the development of its self-driving car, is bringing together his former employer with his current passion: Google and Udacity are launching an Android "nanodegree" program -- a six-course online degree that will prepare software developers to build apps for Android, from the first spark of an idea to launching on the Google Play store.
The nanodegree program, which was announced at Google's annual I/O developer conference in San Francisco Thursday, will take six to nine months to complete (at around 10 hours a week, with variance for a student's pre-existing knowledge) and will cost $200 per month. Students can sign up starting Thursday.
All the course content is free online, but the $200 per month pays for the non-scaleable parts of the degree: project grading, feedback, instructor mentorship, assistance and a final certification. The coursework was developed in partnership with Google's developer relations team, with top developers on-camera to lead lessons, and contains the most "bleeding-edge" education on how to program for Android devices, Thrun said.
A big appeal for Google is scaleable training. "I would go around teaching a training class in Taiwan for 12 people, then fly to San Jose and do a class for 20 people," said Peter Lubbers, a senior program manager at Google.
Google also gets a chance to look closely at the cream of the student crop: the class's top 50 students will visit the Google campus and meet with hiring engineers in a three-day summit at the end of the year. But the degree will be valuable when applying to jobs with any employer that needs to develop for Android, not just Google, Thrun said.
"If you do what we tell you to do with this program, you can get $100,000, $180,000 as an entry-level salary in Silicon Valley," Thrun said.
Google is offering 2,000 scholarships to students in need, and Udacity will pay back half the tuition to students who complete the course and request a half-refund -- a way to incentivize completion and make the program more accessible to people at lower income levels.
"When we go out and say, 'Here's a course, take it for free,' we get finishing rates typically around 3%," Thrun said. "When we go in, put in a degree, advising, mentorships, access to instructors, the finishing rate goes up to 92%. ... There are highly motivated people who can educate themselves with books. But we want to catch everybody."
The Android nanodegree is Udacity's sixth degree of that size -- the name reflects that it is shorter than a one-year associate's degree. The others are in areas like front-end development and data analysis.
