From my perspective (with its associated biases), this Fast Company article is a must read!

The father of MOOCs has pivoted Udacity to a company-paid content model.  Here are some pf the paragraphs that struck me:

“We were on the front pages of newspapers and magazines, and at the same time, I was realizing, we don’t educate people as others wished, or as I wished.  We have a lousy product,” Thrun tells me. “It was a painful moment.” Turns out he doesn’t even like the term MOOC.

“These were students from difficult neighborhoods, without good access to computers, and with all kinds of challenges in their lives,” he says. “It’s a group for which this medium is not a good fit.” (Referring to low pass rates (25%) of SJSU students in remedial math – 82% did complete course)

If Wilson seems slightly unprofessional as an educator, that’s because his only formal teaching credential is as an assistant scuba-diving instructor. Wilson works at Google as a developer advocate in the company’s Chrome division. His class was conceived, and paid for, by Google as a way to attract developers to its platforms. Over the past year, Udacity has recruited a dozen or so companies, including Autodesk, Intuit, Cloudera, Nvidia, 23andMe, and Salesforce.com, which had sent a couple of reps to discuss a forthcoming course on how to best use its application programming interface, or API. The companies pay to produce the classes and pledge to accept the certificates awarded by Udacity for purposes of employment.

Thrun, ever a master of academic branding, terms this sponsored-course model the Open Education Alliance and says it is both the future of Udacity and, more generally, college education. “At the end of the day, the true value proposition of education is employment,” Thrun says, sounding more CEO than professor.“If you focus on the single question of who knows best what students need in the workforce, it’s the people already in the workforce. Why not give industry a voice?”

“At the end of the day, the true value proposition of education is employment,” Thrun says, sounding more CEO than professor. “Why not give industry a voice?”

Udacity won’t disclose how much it is making, but Levine of Andreessen Horowitz says he’s pleased. “The attitude from the beginning, about how we’d make money, was, ‘We’ll figure it out,'” he says. “Well, we figured it out.”

Still, I couldn’t help but feel as if Thrun’s revised vision for Udacity was quite a comedown from the educational Wonderland he had talked about when he launched the company. Learning, after all, is about more than some concrete set of vocational skills. It is about thinking critically and asking questions, about finding ways to see the world from different points of view rather than one’s own. These, I point out, are not skills easily acquired by YouTube video.

Thrun seems to enjoy this objection. He tells me he wasn’t arguing that Udacity’s current courses would replace a traditional education–only that it would augment it. “We’re not doing anything as rich and powerful as what a traditional liberal-arts education would offer you,” he says. He adds that the university system will most likely evolve to shorter-form courses that focus more on professional development. “The medium will change,” he says.