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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.

Business Ecosystems

James F. Moore in 1993

Today, "ecosystem leaders" are generally referred to as "keystone organizations". Keystone organizations can be large or small, complex or simple, and include not-for-profit or commercial for-profit organizations. Commercially oriented keystone organizations are the most dominant and most successful in terms of economic value created as a whole and for ecosystem members. Examples of commercial keystone organizations include large companies such as eBay, Google and Apple. Not-for-profit keystone organizations are less common and are emergent. Examples of not-for-profit keystone organizations include the Eclipse Foundation, Joomla, Drupal, the Mozilla Foundation, the Apache Software Foundation, and the Open Group.

free things aren’t going anywhere anytime soon. There’s more free product online right now than at any other time in history. We’re talking Daily Show clips, Google Books and entire libraries of music and news from every corner of the globe backed by advertising. Free is bait. It's supposed to get you hooked. If you’ve played many mobile games, this pattern might be familiar. It’s called “freemium,” in which companies offer their apps at no cost and then charge for the good stuff once you’re addicted. (This model is also popular among drug dealers.)

the fear that the ways we work now are harming and/or killing us.

The damage that can be done by workplaces like Amazon’s is much more insidious, and difficult to detect — and when people die, their obituary says things like heart disease or stroke or suicide.

In many cases, we are drawn to behavior that is bad for us, and that arguably applies to the workplace as well. In a piece he wrote for Medium recently, Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz talks about the early days of the company and how he slept little and ate badly, and was hyper-competitive with co-workers. Was this worth it because of what they accomplished? Not at all, he says.

Increasingly, they judge our character.

Upstart has over the last 15 months lent $135 million to people with mostly negligible credit ratings. Typically, they are recent graduates without mortgages, car payments or credit card settlements.

ZestFinance, is a former Google executive whose company writes loans to subprime borrowers through nonstandard data signals.