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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.

“If you go to my rates page on my site, you’ll see I have a project minimum. I say ‘the typical project costs around this. The only reason that I show that is to keep people from contacting me, not to get them to contact me.” See? He says NO, before the question is even asked. “I think that’s a mistake freelancers make: if you’re thinking of sharing your rates as a means of saying ‘hey, i’m cheaper’, you’re gonna get the kind of work that is cheap and work with the kind of clients that are cheap”.

There is no doubt that we need to innovate, collaborate and evaluate, to name three of the “21st-century” so dear to digital literacy enthusiasts. But such skills can’t be separated from the knowledge that gives rise to them. To innovate, you need to know what came before. To collaborate, you must contribute knowledge to the joint venture. And to evaluate, you have to compare new information with knowledge you’ve already mastered.

There is no doubt that we need to innovate, collaborate and evaluate, to name three of the “21st-century” so dear to digital literacy enthusiasts. But such skills can’t be separated from the knowledge that gives rise to them. To innovate, you need to know what came before. To collaborate, you must contribute knowledge to the joint venture. And to evaluate, you have to compare new information with knowledge you’ve already mastered.

There is no doubt that we need to innovate, collaborate and evaluate, to name three of the “21st-century” so dear to digital literacy enthusiasts. But such skills can’t be separated from the knowledge that gives rise to them. To innovate, you need to know what came before. To collaborate, you must contribute knowledge to the joint venture. And to evaluate, you have to compare new information with knowledge you’ve already mastered.

Tagging content as licensable via Creative Commons Ensuring content is easily downloadable for use in a variety of learning environments Eliminating cost barriers to participating in a course Eliminating technical barriers to participating in a course Opening courses to the public, so users don’t have to log in

To accomplish this, we embraced the network principle of “node not hub,” deciding early on not to invest in top-down remedies, but in collaborative models that would remain in tact after our initial financial support ended, usually after a period of 5-7 years.

equired that local communities develop a data-gathering system.

consensus data model that large segments of our industry could embrace and use to standardize terminology and reporting across all shelters. We invested in building data-gathering systems for the shelter field and saw those early efforts blossom into genuine cultural change.