Udacity acquires CloudLabs to enable collaborative programming for students

Marking its first ever acquisition, online education platform Udacity has acquired CloudLabs, a small five-person firm building interactive coding environments that let groups collaboratively code from within their browsers.

Interestingly, Cloud Labs also creates platforms where others can come up with interactive computer programming courses. For instance, Terminal.com that enabled the custom creation of computer programming courses built around an interactive, container-based, command-line interface.

Meanwhile, Udacity hopes to implement the company’s live developer environments in some of its courses. With this new tech, instructors will be able to inspect the code, draw attention to specific issues and screen share with students.

Also, CloudLabs CEO Dr Varun Ganapathi and his five-person team are staying at Udacity. Ganapathi will be helping in the integration process here and later become part of Udacity’s machine learning projects. Udacity is also hoping to leverage the team and use them to automate stuff like grading. “We believe that human feedback is going to be super important, but we can make graders more efficient and drive down the final cost for students,” said Vish Makhijani, CEO of Udacity.

CloudLabs not only gets some vital assets for Udacity in form of intellectual properties but have also netted it a new team of proficient programmers as well. According to Makhijani, they began by integrating some features from Terminal.com into its nano degrees but then felt things dovetailing perfectly and decided to acquire the company itself.

Meanwhile, development of Terminal.com will halt as the team transitions into its new roles.