Assuming this matches the print version, it discusses the history of MooCs from Khan Academy forward, to paid credential programs, and how people are being assessed.
Some notable points:
1. Universities should work to define a more "premium" experience to compete with nanodegrees and the trend toward short, very modularized classes
2. Online programs have not cannabilized universities as expected (more likely people in their 30s retraining)
3. Second half is all about providing credentials, which is hard and not well solved. They list a bunch of startups, LinkedIn, etc working on it, but it's just a maze of certifications, so it's hard to know what any of them mean
There are a couple articles in this series. Other interesting points:
1. They mention a trend toward evaluating people for the ability to retrain (i.e. looking for personality traits like curiosity, empathy, ability to break tasks into parts, learn quickly).
2. Also a trend toward combining previously unrelated fields (marketing + algorithms, for instance).
3. Since the U.S. doesn't do much vocational training, they look at other countries, and say that in those places people drop out of the work force younger (i.e. they run into difficulties retraining to keep up)
4. They talk about a lot of scenarios where people are commonly left out of the workforce entirely (no path from truck driver to coder, hard for people just out of school with no experience, there are some gaps in the middle of some careers as well)
nice @gary, spent a bit of time finding things I'm researching. Not sure how you'd describe it, Search engine for ^stuff^ (vid,sound) on learning? One thing I had trouble finding was Hal Ableson, 6.001 MIT lectures. [0] I know where it is, but I couldn't find it, searching for it by terms. Terms tried:
Good question - short answer is I've been focusing on finding collections that people don't know about, but I'm working on adding the MIT lectures - should be up in a day or two :)
I'd describe this as a discovery engine for lectures - the goal is to replicate some of the experience of browsing a library for interesting books (vs. traditional search, which is more about minimizing clicks between you and an answer)
