Udacity offers self-driving car courses; working with Google to achieve 20 lakh skilled Android developers in India

Aligning with India’sDigital India plans, Google had announced its Android Skilling initiative . While the National Skill Development Corporation has extended its hands to Google, there are others too such as Udacity. Udacity offers online courses to students and professionals to get the most in-demand skills. The skill-targeted programs called as Nanodegrees are formed by industry including Google. Vardhan Koshal, Country Manager, India Udacity tells us that the courses or rather nanodegree programs have been built carefully in a way that students and working professionals will feel that the expert is personally teaching them. These programs are at helping set the right learning goals, bite-sized video lectures covering single concept for 1- 3 minutes, offering student feedback and constant mentoring and support from experts. Talking about Sundar Pichai’s dream of 20 lakh Android skilled workforce in India, Koshal adds that the ambitious goal is achieveable in three years given Google’s track record. “It (Google) has developed multiple courses and Nanodegrees along with Udacity, and 2 of them are in Android, The Android Developer Nanodegree and The Android Basics Nanodegree for beginners. Google, along with us, also launched an Android Associate Certification recently in order to standardise the Android development skills,” he explains. During the Android Skilling program, Ceaser Sengupta, Vice President of product management at Google had said, “India is expected to have the largest developer population globally, overtaking the US by 2018, with four million developers. By building a world class curriculum and making it easily accessible to millions of students and developers in India, we want to contribute to the Skill India initiative and help make India the global leader in mobile app development.” Another interesting aspect is self-driving car courses at Udacity. The number of companies investing in self-driving cars has only fueled the need for engineers with relevant skills. A self-driving car requires an interdisciplinary set of skills, he explains listing these:

• Computer vision - through cameras, lasers and other sensors.
• Machine learning - training the computer to make driving decisions.
• Robotics - using a computer to control the car.

“Currently, there is no place in the world where a student can learn these skills at a professional level from proven experts. At Udacity our founder Sebastian Thrun, the pioneer of self-driving cars at Google, has personally designed the program. Just like all our Nanodegrees, it has the highest quality available anywhere in the world. More than 15000 students have already requested us for enrollment - even before the launch,” he explains.