Ultimately, education is 2nd only to defense as an industry. Relative to the hype (and to what I think the potential is), computers and the internet haven't imp

Ultimately, education is 2nd only to defense as an industry. Relative to the hype (and to what I think the potential is), computers and the internet haven't impacted the industry much. At least, at first glance. At second glance, I think you'll find huge changes in how people learn things informally. I don't even mean doing online courses on the side. I mean blogs and PDFs and stackoverflow. If you can program, bake or pick locks, there's a good chance you learned online. Online learning has also been supporting the "we don't train employees" norms of the modern knowledge economy. The internet is a huge part of how people learn, it just isn't a big part of education. This is one of the reasons I think there is a lot of potential for major disruptions. If you try tackling credentials in a college-like way, this risks leaning into old paradigms and not really changing much. You'll never complete with Harvard on prestige, but you can probably compete on everything else (from social aspects to educational ones) with enough determination. Idk what the answers are for udacity, but overall I think the best approach is meandering discovery rather than point-and-row. Taking steps back is part of that.