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alary history must die too. And while we’re at it, can we put an end to the equally archaic and bizarre corollary practice of asking people for their salary history during negotiation? How is what someone made in a previous job relevant to the current position? Do we care what snacks they ate in their last job too? Salary history is a great way to ensure that people who are underpaid—again, a lot of women and minorities—remain underpaid. I have a friend who passed by several jobs that would have paid her three times what she is making; because she loves and is loyal to a small organization, she decided to remain there as ED, earning $45,000. When she finally left on good terms, a bigger org asked for her salary history and then offered $49,500 to be its ED, because that’s a “generous 10% increase” from what she was making, even though the industry average for an ED of an organization of that size is about $60,000. That’s effed up. 

Encouraged by Watson Sr. and his executive team, employees often formed their own study groups. One, known as the Owl Club, allowed employees to study any subject they wanted at company expense. Such programs evolved into adult learning classes, and eventually into grants for employees to pursue college credits and degrees

Today, industry specialists around the world in IBM Global Business Services use an array of e-learning tools—including podcasts and Twitter—customer on-site classes, and IBM conferences and classrooms to educate customers on everything from the use of social media and cloud computing, to how to build a smarter rail system. And IBM employees worldwide take advantage of their networked community to draw upon each other’s skills day and night to solve customer problems and develop the capabilities clients value most.

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.

mechanism by which this shift in power from institutions to individuals would take place. We now know that mechanism is pull.

Pull allows each of us to find and access people and resources when we need them, while attracting to us the people and resources that are relevant and valuable

Employers that fail to provide sufficient professional development opportunities for their employees. These companies will lose their most talented workers to more magnetic organizations that provide better chances for learning and growth.

In the group that did the best someone took on a lead role and was able to delegate and make sure things were done effectively.&nbsp;This makes me wonder about teaching project management and group dynamics for the social sciences and other solo-author disciplines?