Like Peter Thiel's Fellows, Sebastian Thrun Dropped Out, Hacked Education, Too - Dale Stephens, Fast Company

Not so long ago, if you wanted to learn something, you had to find an expert. These experts resided in universities, and were often off limits if one wasn't a matriculated student. Then in 1999, MIT announced they were putting their course online. In the last 12 years many other institutions have followed suit. Then came the Khan Academy, ALISON, and others. Today knowledge is freely accessible to anyone. Last fall, Stanford made the bold announcement that two of their courses would be taught online--artificial intelligence and machine learning classes. No one expected hundreds of thousands of people to sign up for the courses. But they did, and by anyone's measure, the courses were a wild success. Two weeks ago, Sebastian Thrun, one of the professors who taught the online courses, dropped a bombshell: He has left Stanford to start teach courses independently. It's a big deal for a professor to dump a university. But dump Stanford Sebastian did. He dumped Stanford because he realized that he--as an individual--holds the power, not Stanford as an institution.