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WeWork is on a mission to create a global platform for people who want to express themselves through the work they do. Oh, and by the way, they also rent office space.

They are attempting to scale a new kind of culture – one that promises a quality workstyle, to be certain, but one that also celebrates who we are as people: we seek to find meaning in work, we seek a connection to a community where we both belong and contribute.

work-life integration, a relatively new phrase rising concurrent to the entrance of millennials in our workforce. But as he explained his support for the idea, I realized I’ve been working this way my entire life. It’s fundamental to the entrepreneurial lifestyle – Life is simply life, and if you’re passionate about what you do, then work is part of that life. As you plan your time, you prioritize everything in that life, and because work is no longer bound to one office space during one eight-hour period of time, you can mix and mingle all kinds of experiences – some work, some family, some personal – throughout your waking day. The flip side of this: If you adopt the philosophy of work-life integration, you must also adopt a philosophy of total individual responsibility. That means understanding how to prioritize things like exercise, nutrition, downtime, and family/friends into a demanding work life. It means that you are willing to be judged not on showing up or managing up, but on the work you deliver to your company. And it means you’ve joined a like-minded group who together have created a company that understands how to thrive in this new environment.

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.

Work­ing well remotely takes&nbsp;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&nbsp;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&nbsp;agony.

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.