Want to earn a degree in flying cars? Now you can

By Nicole DiGiose, content editor

There are many university degrees that have proven to be timeless, but as technology evolves, some college curriculums can’t keep up with the times. In this day and age, by the time students graduate, the information that they learned earlier in their education could be obsolete. Fortunately, online school Udacity is offering specialized, future-looking nanodegree programs.

Sebastian Thrun believes that there are plenty of smart people, but the missing link is education. Image source: Udacity.

Udacity already offers a nanodegree in self-driving vehicles , and now, co-founder Sebastian Thrun is launching a flying car degree program . Thrun, a 50-year-old Ph.D. computer scientist and former Stanford University professor, has been with Udacity since its launch in 2012. He told Reuters  that his online school’s self-driving car program has attracted 50,000 applicants since 2016, and he expects the new flying car curriculum, opening in late February, to draw at least 10,000.

At $1,200 each, Udacity is offering two 12-week terms, including a course in aerial robotics and another in intelligent air systems, that provide online certification in a fraction of the time of a traditional degree course.

In an interview with Reuters, Thrun said that his motivation in creating the flying car program was similar to what drove the school’s self-driving car course. According to Thrun, it’s near impossible to hire qualified people to design and engineer future vehicles — both terrestrial and aerial — that employ advanced technology, including robotics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning.

Udacity’s flying car degree program aims to fill the gap in knowledge. Image source: Udacity.

“There is a huge shortage of engineers,” said Thrun, who led the team that launched Google’s self-driving car project, now named Waymo. “There are plenty of smart people. The missing link is education.”

A flying car degree program such as Udacity’s could fill this gap in knowledge.

“It feels like science fiction now,” said Thrun. “But with Google and Amazon moving in, there is going to be enormous activity around this in the next year or two.”

Do you think that taking online courses on a website such as Udacity could pay off? Leave a comment below.