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Work­ing well remotely takes practice

What they don’t always think about, though, is the inher­ent fire­wall a com­mute cre­ates between “work” and “per­sonal life”. Work­ing out of a home office opens up an entire world of sur­pris­ingly difficult-​​to-​​handle dis­trac­tions, par­tic­u­larly for those of us with fam­i­lies. It’s easy to avoid a gui­tar wield­ing tod­dler when the office is 5 miles away and he has no driver’s license. It’s harder when the wall between the liv­ing room and the office makes a delight­ful bang­ing noise when struck with a guitar.

Hav­ing cen­tral­ized offices can wreck a bud­ding remote friendly cul­ture. Work­ing in a way that’s inclu­sive of peo­ple who aren’t phys­i­cally (or even tem­po­rally) present is not entirely nat­ural, and exclud­ing remote employ­ees from impor­tant inter­ac­tions is a quick path to agony.

The problem, of course, is that those students represent the precise group MOOCs are meant to serve. “MOOCs were supposed to be the device that would bring higher education to the masses,” Jonathan Rees noted. “However, the masses at San Jose State don’t appear to be ready for the commodified, impersonal higher education that MOOCs offer.” Thrun’s cavalier disregard for the SJSU students reveals his true vision of the target audience for MOOCs: students from the posh suburbs, with 10 tablets apiece and no challenges whatsoever—that is, the exact people who already have access to expensive higher education. It is more than galling that Thrun blames students for the failure of a medium that was invented to serve them, instead of blaming the medium that, in the storied history of the “correspondence” course (“TV/VCR repair”!), has never worked. For him, MOOCs don’t fail to educate the less privileged because the massive online model is itself a poor tool. No, apparently students fail MOOCs because those students have the gall to be poor, so let’s give up on them and move on to the corporate world, where we don’t have to be accountable to the hoi polloi anymore, or even have to look at them, because gross.

SG_Debug && SG_Debug.pagedebug && window.console && console.log && console.log('[' + (new Date()-SG_Debug.initialTime)/1000 + ']' + ' Bottom of header.jsp'); SlateEducationGetting schooled.Nov. 19 2013 11:43 AM The King of MOOCs Abdicates the Throne 7.3k 1.2k 101 Sebastian Thrun and Udacity’s “pivot” toward corporate training. By Rebecca Schuman &nbsp; Sebastian Thrun speaks during the Digital Life Design conference on Jan. 23, 2012, in Munich. Photo by Johannes Simon/Getty Images requirejs(["jquery"], function($) { if ($(window).width() < 640) { $(".slate_image figure").width("100%"); } }); Sebastian Thrun, godfather of the massive open online course, has quietly spread a plastic tarp on the floor, nudged his most famous educational invention into the center, and is about to pull the trigger. Thrun—former Stanford superprofessor, Silicon Valley demigod, and now CEO of online-course purveyor Udacity—just admitted to Fast Company’s openly smitten Max Chafkin that his company’s courses are often a “lousy product.” Rebecca Schuman Rebecca Schuman is an education columnist for Slate. Follow This is quite a “pivot” from the Sebastian Thrun, who less than two years ago crowed to Wired that the unstemmable tide of free online education would leave a mere 10 purveyors of higher learning in its wake, one of which would be Udacity. However, on the heels of the embarrassing failure of a loudly hyped partnership with San Jose State University, the “lousiness” of the product seems to have become apparent. The failures of massive online education come as no shock to those of us who actually educate students by being in the same room wit

nd why the answer is not the MOOC, but the tiny, for-credit, in-person seminar that has neither a sexy acronym nor a potential for huge corporate partnerships.

When you create a culture where women are casually torn apart in conversation, how can you ever stomach promoting them, or working for them?

It’s hard to violate social norms; it’s even harder when doing so means jeopardizing millions of dollars in future earnings. For an intern, a connection with a managing director can mean a foothold in one of the most lucrative career paths in the world.

A woman has never been the chief executive of a major investment bank. Only about 2 percent of hedge fund managers are women. During my years on Wall Street I never saw a woman run a trading or sales desk, which is the first step toward executive management.

40% to 45% of what we do every day sort of feels like a decision, but it’s actually habit.

There’s a cue, which is like a trigger for the behavior to start unfolding, A routine, which is the habit itself, the behavior, the automatic sort of doing what you do when you do a habit.

And then at the end, there’s a reward. And the reward is how our neurology learns to encode this pattern for the future.

People who fetishize leadership sometimes find themselves longing for crisis.

Our faith in the value of leadership is durable—it survives, again and again, our disappointment with actual leaders.

f you’re flexible in how you translate the word “leadership,” you’ll find that people have been thinking about it for a very long time.

Today’s ability to oh-so-easily see and hear each other online is a double-edged sword: it can make electronic communication more personable, but it can also inject offline prejudices evoked by how someone looks or sounds.

Now, a lot of online communication is done synchronously, or nearly so: volunteers are online together, at the same time, talking together, and staff supporting those volunteers is often seeing their volunteering activities in real time.

People do not communicate primarily via e-mail anymore; they now talk together via online social networks and in the comments section of blogs, photo-sharing sites, and video-sharing sites. Some people send far more SMS messages than email messages.

“Staffing, workflow, finance and fundraising will be the trends to watch in nonprofit operations during 2017 when it comes to charities and associations.”

“The Limitations of Seeing Volunteers Only as Unpaid Staff,”

volunteers are seen as ancillary, not central.