{"id":207,"date":"2017-07-29T10:20:06","date_gmt":"2017-07-29T10:20:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/redquark.com\/wp\/?p=207"},"modified":"2017-07-29T10:20:37","modified_gmt":"2017-07-29T10:20:37","slug":"well-played-udacity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/redquark.com\/wp\/?p=207","title":{"rendered":"Well Played, Udacity!"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>This past week, Udacity was offering a &#8220;Discovery Week&#8221; special of 50% off tuition for the first two months of the iOS Developer Nanodegree. I was very, very tempted. I however did not take advantage of the offer for the following reasons:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>I set out on this task to complete the requirements for the Nanodegree without signing up and thought it important to finish the experiment as originally laid out<\/li>\n<li>I am not yet finished<\/li>\n<li>Although I appear to be on schedule for finishing in the next month, I never know what might prevent me from doing so<\/li>\n<li>Every month I am not signed up for the Nanodegree is a month I don&#8217;t have to send Udacity any money<\/li>\n<li>In the past, Udacity regularly offered me the opportunity to sign up for the Nanodegree with the first two weeks free, which is cheaper than 50% off if I finish in the first two weeks<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>What would have tempted me enough to abandon my original plan and sign up? 50% off the first <em>three<\/em> months probably would have done it.<\/p>\n<p>I have to say that I don&#8217;t think the subscription model is the right one for this Nanodegree. I would think a better means of monetization would be a fixed price with a six month payment schedule. If you finish early and want your Nanodegree earlier than six months, then pay the remaining tab early. If you need to drop out for a while and can&#8217;t afford the payments, fine, pause the payments and jump back in when you can afford it.<\/p>\n<p>Yes, Udacity would potentially have to support students pursuing the Nanodegree beyond six months without additional funds coming in after that time (because they would have already paid in full), but I think those people would be few and far between and not likely to linger too terribly long. Getting their Nanodegree is incentive enough; they don&#8217;t need further financial incentive. If there is a significant cost associated with these stragglers, it can probably be spread across the student body (in the form of slightly-higher tuition) without negatively impacting the number of people signing up.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This past week, Udacity was offering a &#8220;Discovery Week&#8221; special of 50% off tuition for the first two months of the iOS Developer Nanodegree. I was very, very tempted. I however did not take advantage of the offer for the following reasons: I set out on this task to complete the requirements for the Nanodegree [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-207","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ios-developer-nanodegree"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/redquark.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/207","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/redquark.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/redquark.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redquark.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redquark.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=207"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/redquark.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/207\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":208,"href":"https:\/\/redquark.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/207\/revisions\/208"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/redquark.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=207"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redquark.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=207"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redquark.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=207"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}