I think this article is all over the map, and I hope akharris is a better entrepreneur than writer. Though he makes one or two good points. The title is total

I think this article is all over the map, and I hope akharris is a better entrepreneur than writer. Though he makes one or two good points. The title is total bullshit. "Linkbait" is giving it too much credit. "Robots" is a complete head fake, and the article literally says nothing at all about whether or not education can be totally digitally mediated. The completion-rate issue. First of all, I think we can all agree that completion rate is at least somewhat interesting, and the link to Katy Jordan's piece is useful if you haven't seen it yet. And while I agree it's not a HUGE deal, for the reasons many others have gone over, akharris makes a good point, as follows: The MOOCs opened themselves up to this criticism, because over and over again they post their vanity metrics of enrollments, and compare them to classroom enrollment, and that's crazy. It's like comparing Facebook signups to private plane purchases. If they had been bragging about completion numbers (not ratios, obviously) all along, they'd be fine. Anyway, my point here is that the focus on the completion rates isn't the worst part of this article, it's pretty near the best part. The next chunk talks about K-12. Obviously most of the MOOCs were never aimed at K-12, so it's an evasion. If you look at the forum conversations or the StackExchange sites or whatever, there are obviously lots of students who are adults from eastern Europe, or Asia (and lots who appear to be middle-class Americans, of course). That's access to education, baby. The rhetorical deceit here actually enrages me. I might make a perfectly-parallel criticism of Tutorspree: "[Harris's] company states that its mission is connect students with great private tutors. So who is getting those tutors? Certainly not Tamil-speaking children in Sri Lanka." What a stupid argument I just made. Just like akharris's argument, that because 7-year-olds aren't benefiting from Sebastian Thrun's robotics courses, he's therefore not living up to Udacity's lofty mission statement. And of course, Khan Academy IS improving access to education. Not in some ideal future, but in the present and in the past. Without one-to-one tutoring, which by the way is obviously beyond the budget of, you know, most families (average price for tutors in my Zip: $88/h). So where's your access now? Admittedly Khan requires an internet connection, but $50/month for internet that the whole family can share, plus a $250 computer, sounds better than $88/h to me. Though it is nice that akharris isn't duplicitous enough to grossly misrepresent Sal Khan's vision for an ideal classroom. Nice work there. The weird part is that the thesis that he's trying to weave, about the value of human contact and personalized teaching, is kind of a no-brainer. And although I think he overstates the awesomeness of his business, I'm willing to assume it's more part-of-the-solution that part-of-the-problem. So why did he have to stoop to all these dodgy half-truths and misdirections? Maybe he needs to hire a composition tutor.